When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Try Adobe Acrobat Studio for free today! Communication is a central part of any business or creative endeavour. Whether its sharing information between colleagues or highlighting the advantages of new products and services to customers, getting the messaging right is an essential part of success. Traditionally, this could involve hours of painstaking work, preparing documents and then replicating their data into slides for presentations.

When it was first released by Adobe in 1993, the PDF was truly transformative technology. The Portable Document Format was a multipurpose container that replicated the appearance and functionality of physical documents. That sounds unimportant, but as adoption spread with Adobe's introduction of free Acrobat software for reading PDFs a year later, anyone, from the government to your doctor's office, could rely on digital documentation that felt familiar to the paper versions. "It wasn't like a text message, which is a native digital format or an email or a web page," says Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland and author of Track Changes, a book about the history of word processing. "The PDF was all about the cultural authority of print and documents that emerged out of human contexts, professions, motivations."