PDF

See also: pdf

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /pi di ɛf/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

Proper noun

PDF

1. (obsolete) Initialism of Parkinson's Disease Foundation, now just Parkinson's Foundation.
2. Abbreviation of People's Defence Force (“armed paramilitary anti-military-rule rebel group in Myanmar”).

Noun

PDF (countable and uncountable, plural PDFs)

1. (computing, software) Initialism of Portable Document Format, a standard for representing electronic documents, allowing them to be transmitted and reproduced accurately with the same printed layout.
   • 2021, Alexander Thomasian, Storage Systems..., §2.13.7:

     DjVu was developed at AT&T Research by Yan^[sic] LeCun et al. in 1966^{[sic – meaning 1996]}. It generates files that are smaller than PDF files. […] PDF primarily encodes graphics and text as vectorized data, whereas DjVu primarily encodes them as pixmap images.

2. (computing, software) Initialism of portable document format (“a document in PDF format”).
   • 2019 June 27, Jack Schofield, “What’s the best cheap tablet or e-reader for PDF files?”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     The reMarkable PDF reader is really targeted at the digital writing market, rather than the digital reading market, though most serious e-readers support pens for annotations and signatures.

   • 2025 September 2, “2026 American Society of Civil Engineers Concrete Canoe Competiton Request for Proposals”, in ASCE‎^[2], archived from the original on 7 September 2025, page 26:

     Teams are required to clearly highlight the relevant specification or standard (e.g., ASTM number, VOC content) directly on the PDF for each material to demonstrate compliance.
     Provide PDFs of basic technical information for materials lacking specific requirements. For example, printouts from store websites or packaging showing material properties are acceptable.

3. (probability theory) Alternative letter-case form of pdf (“probability density function”).
4. (Unicode) Initialism of pop directional format.

Derived terms

• PDF file
• PDFify
• PDFize

Descendants

• Translingual: .pdf

See also

• Adobe

Verb

PDF (third-person singular simple present PDFs, present participle PDFing, simple past and past participle PDFed)

1. (transitive, software) To convert (something) to PDF format.

   Synonyms: PDFify, PDFize

Further reading

• PDF on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• PFD

Spanish

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˌpe ˌde ˈefe/ [ˌpe ˌð̞e ˈe.fe]
• Syllabification: PDF

Noun

PDF m (plural PDF or (proscribed) PDFs)

1. a PDF file