Opening PDF Files

Information, tips and instructions

Opening PDF Files

To open any PDF files you need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader from Adobe website. This software is distributed absolutely free of charge. Also you can find Adobe Acrobat Reader software on one of CDs distributed with computer magazines.

If you don't want to install additional software on your computer you can use free service provided by Adobe to convert PDFs to other text formats.

At this moment Adobe provides service to convert to the following formats:

HTML 3.2
Text

To convert your PDF document to either of these formats you need to send it as an e-mail attachment to following e-mail addresses:

pdf2html@adobe.com - HTML 3.2
pdf2txt@adobe.com - Text

Adobe will reply to your e-mail with an attachment in corresponding format. One of the goals of this service from Adobe was to enable blind and visually impaired users to read Adobe PDF documents with speech synthesis software. Because of this when you convert PDF using this service graphics elements will be removed and text reformatted. Thus if you want to preserve graphics and images we strongly recommend to use Adobe Acrobate Reader software.

PDF in Text Format

Note that you can try opening PDF files in text editor but most probably you won't see anything readable there since most of information is compressed. But at least you can verify that this is a PDF file by looking for %PDF-1 letters at the beginning of it.

If you're really passionate in fixing and editing PDF files manually and without use of any software there are several tools on the market (like tool.pdf.Uncompress Java library) which allow converting PDF to human (I would say programmer) readable format. Once you uncompress PDF file using these tools you will see a text file in some way similar to HTML which contains set of instructions on how to draw the document. You can find full spec of PDF format here.

More Information on File Extension PDF:

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Download DriverCure - an application which can fix such errors.

Extension Details
Portable Document Format
MIME Type
application/pdf application/x-pdf text/x-pdf
Identifying Characters
`Hex: 25 50 44 46 2D 31 2E ASCII: %PDF-1.`
Opens with
Acrobat Reader Sumatra PDF Foxit Reader

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See also File Extension PPS
and layout php bug fix should be here File Extension PPT