PDF documents have become a de-facto standard in the world's electronic community. Virtually all business and home computer users have the free Adobe Acrobat reader installed and running on their computers, or use browsers that display PDFs, or have some other means of quickly and easily displaying PDFs. This means that PDF documents are readable by anybody, anywhere, and can be used more or less universally. So instead of worrying about whether intended users would be able to read documents produced in formats a through z, organizations can produce documents using the PDF standard with the near-certainty that they will be readable by the intended audience. Next week or next year or ten years from now. On PCs and Macintoshes and tablets and Linux machines and whatever else comes along.
The generation of PDF documents can be extremely helpful to an organization, and can significantly improve operations and reduce costs. As one example, consider invoices; using PDFX, you may easily specify that instead of sending invoices to a printer where they begin a long and expensive journey involving paper and the postal service, instead they get "printed" to PDF documents and automatically emailed to the intended recipient. This is really quite easy to do and would likely involve very minor changes to an application. The directives—ALL of the directives—that would have to be added to the invoice/report in order to have it produced as a PDF document and emailed are:
//PDFX,Email.Method,6
//PDFX,Email.Content,"Here is your invoice from ABC Manufacturing."
//PDFX,Email.To,"jill@microsabio.com, josie@microsabio.com"
The first directive tells PDFX to use the PC's default email client program and send the email without user intervention. The second directive specifies some text for the body of the email, and the third line gives the "send to" address. That's all there is to it. Really!
The arguments for using the PDFX method of generating PDF output, versus using some other package such as PDF995, Adobe, etc., are:
| • | It works like a printer driver so no coding changes to existing reports are required |
| • | It offers an interface, accessed via the //PDFX directive, which allows you much more control and flexibility than most printer-driver implementations of PDF writers. |
Another major benefit of PDF documents, which applies particularly to government agencies and large organizations, is archiving of documents. "PDF/A" is an industry-standard specification for how PDF documents should be composed and formatted so as to be suitable for long-term archival purposes. PDFX supports PDF/A, and can therefore generate the documents and comply with governmental and corporate archiving standards.
