Adobe PDF Converter Instructions

      PDF or Portable Document Format was created in 1993 by Adobe Systems for document exchanges. PDF is used for representing documents independently of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

     Text in PDF is represented by text elements.  A text element specifies that some characters are drawn at certain positions on the page. The characters are specified using the encoding of a selected font.

     PDF files can also be created specifically to be accessible for disabled people.  Some of the current PDF file formats can include tags (XML), text equivalents, captions, audio descriptions, etc.  Some PDF conversion software can automatically produce tagged PDFs. Leading screen readers, including JAWS, Window-Eyes, Hal, and Kurzweil 1000 and 3000 can read tagged PDFs; current versions of the Acrobat and Acrobat Reader programs can also read PDFs aloud.

     A PDF file is often a combination of vector graphics, text and raster graphics.  The basic types of content in a PDF are:

• text stored as text
• vector graphics for illustrations and designs mainly consisting of shapes and lines.
• raster graphics for photographs and other types of image

     As a document format, PDF has several advantages over PostScript:

• PDF contains interpreted results of the PostScript source code, for direct communication between changes to items in the PDF page description and changes to the resulting page appearance.
• PDF supports true graphic transparency; PostScript does not.
• PostScript is an imperative programming language with an implicit global state, so instructions accompanying the description of one page can affect the appearance of any following page. Therefore, all preceding pages in a PostScript document must be processed in order to determine the correct appearance of a given page, whereas each page in a PDF document is unaffected by the others. As a result, PDF viewers allow the user to quickly jump to the final pages of a long document,

     To convert an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file to HTML or text, simply type a URL for an Adobe PDF document into this electronic form and select "Convert". The Adobe PDF document will be converted and returned to you in your browser application. Depending on the complexity of the document and the number of requests being made on the server at the time, the conversion process may take a while.  Conversion services typically include text Adobe PDF files that are in English and most West European languages.

     You can use Adobe Reader to save the PDF file as text, or use the full version of Adobe Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard to save the file to text or other formats, including Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, or XML.

     Unfortunately, Adobe's web-based conversion services do not support FTP servers, but you can download the file and submit it using the e-mail method.