* A proprietary format of Adobe Corporation, it has become a de facto standard for transmitting documents that the sender does not want to be altered and for transmitting documents to commercial printers and to the Web for online publishing. [1]
* A file format developed by Adobe Systems. PDF captures formatting information from a variety of desktop publishing applications, making it possible to send formatted documents and have them appear on the recipient's monitor or printer as they were intended. To view a file in PDF format, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free application distributed by Adobe Systems. [2] [3] [4]
* A file standard for documents that can be processed (generally viewed and printed) by any computer, regardless of the specific application program which created the original. [5]
* An Adobe technology for formatting documents so that they can be viewed and printed using the Adobe Acrobat reader. [6]
* PDF’s can be read using Adobe Acrobat Reader (a free program), regardless of the program used to create the original document. A PDF document can contain text, images, or both. Only PDFs containing text can be searched directly. Those containing images only must be OCRed.

[1] RenewData, Glossary (10/5/2005).
[2] Fios, E-Discovery Glossary, http://discoveryresources.org/01_electronic_discovery_glossary.html
[3] Vinson & Elkins LLP Practice Support, EDD Glossary.
[4] RSI, Glossary.
[5] American Document Management, Glossary of Terms, http://www.amdoc.com/glossary.shtml
[6] Kroll Ontrack, Glossary of Terms, http://www.krollontrack.com/glossaryterms

Attributions
- EDRM (http://edrm.net)