I bet there are many people who didn’t know that there are several types of PDF until they read this article. If you happen to be one of those people, you shouldn’t feel bad because you are not the only one. There are so many people who don’t even know what PDF is and that is okay too because we are not born knowledgeable, but have to acquire the knowledge over time. In this article, I will look at the three main types of PDF documents, how they are created, and much more about them.
Real PDF
Real PDF is also known as True or Normal PDF and it is the kind of PDF that is created digitally by printing to PDF from various programs. The file is created digitally using various programs such as Corel Draw, Adobe InDesign, and Microsoft Word. Real PDF files are ideal for most applications and they can also be searched by default. You can search both the text and images contained in these types of PDF files. Besides searching, you can also copy paste the content in this file into other file formats like MS Word.
If you choose to make a real PDF file using Microsoft Word, you will have to open MS Word and then type your document. After that, you can then go to the “save as” command from the file drop down menu. The “save as” dialog box will then open up from where you can choose the file extension you want to save your file as. From the drop down menu that comes up, you should select PDF and then click on “save” after you type in the file name and choose the location you wish to save it on your computer.
You can use a PDF converter to word to convert a real PDF file to word if you like.
Scanned PDF
It is possible to create a PDF document by scanning it in a scanner. When you scan a piece of magazine for example, what you are doing is simply capturing the image as a PDF document. The device you use to view the document may not be able to detect the text contained in the scanned PDF document but the human eye can. The scan is seen as an image to which additional header and footer content can be added.
It is still possible to make your computer to detect the text that is contained in a scanned PDF document. To do this, you need a software tool that contains Optical Character Recognition engine within it.
Searchable PDF
The last type of PDF is the searchable kind of PDF file. Basically, a searchable PDF document is a scanned document that was passed through OCR to make it searchable. When you pass a scanned PDF document into OCR, what you are simply doing is to create two layers with one containing the image while the second one contains recognized text that you can then search. The recognized text can also be annotated, copied and pasted, and redacted.