For many Windows and MacIntosh applications, creating a PDF file is as simple as printing the document. For applications that produce their output in the PostScript Language, there is the Adobe Acrobat Distiller that converts the PostScript to PDF, compressing it and allowing image downsampling to further reduce the resulting file size. Finally, for documents available only in paper form, the so called legacy documents, there is Adobe Acrobat Capture to do text recognition and to create a PDF form of the document that looks just like the scanned page. Since text is represented in a form that allows extracting the character content, these PDF documents, no matter how created, can also be indexed. PDF is an object-oriented, device independent representation of the document.
Text is represented as strings that are rendered using high quality, typograhic scalable fonts.
These fonts are identified with enough information to allow quality substitutions to be performed if the font is not available at the receiving site or the real font data can be embeded in the font for printing and viewing. The Adobe Acrobat Amber viewers provide anti-aliased display of these fonts. Graphics are respresented using the time proven PostScript imaging model. The PDF language has the full capability of PostScript, already used to represent most sophisticated printed graphics. PDF also has the wide range of PostScript Level 2 image formats.