PDF WORKFLOW--Still a Juggling Act

BY MARK SMITH

PDF is supposed to stand for Portable Document Format, but "pretty darn frustrating" has been a more fitting moniker in many ways. When Adobe introduced the Acrobat software family, with PDF as its core technology, it was billed as the answer to the shortcomings inherent in the PostScript language, among other things. The coveted benefits of PDF include the ability to generate relatively small, self-contained (including fonts) files that can be processed more efficiently and reliably.