The Adobe-developed file format and Acrobat, the program to create it, were introduced in June 1993.

With Acrobat and PDF, Adobes business has grown to serve graphics professionals, governments, consumers and business users, said Adobe president and chief executive Bruce Chizen. There are now 500,000 copies of Acrobat Reader in use to allow the viewing and printing of PDFs.

PDF was developed from PostScript, the page description language that built Adobes fortune and led to the desktop publishing revolution.