Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is a family of applications for viewing, creating, editing, signing, and managing Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
Adobe Acrobat Reader: Adobe’s free application for viewing, printing, annotating, and signing PDF files. It provides Acrobat’s core PDF-reading functions without the full paid editing toolset.
Portable Document Format: A file format that preserves document layout across software, devices, and operating systems. PDF is the format Acrobat was built to display and manipulate.
Foxit PDF Editor: A commercial application for viewing, creating, editing, and managing PDF documents. It offers a competing feature set for organizations choosing a PDF editing platform.
John Warnock: An American computer scientist who co-founded Adobe and proposed the Camelot project that led to PDF. His document-portability proposal set Acrobat’s technical direction.
Digital document: A document represented and stored in electronic form. Acrobat helped establish PDFs as a widely exchanged kind of digital document.
Adobe Acrobat Pro: Adobe’s paid Acrobat edition with advanced PDF editing, conversion, forms, redaction, and accessibility tools. It brings together the advanced document-production and management features in the Acrobat family.
PDF metadata: Structured information embedded in a PDF, such as its title, author, creation date, and document properties. Acrobat can inspect and edit document properties stored alongside visible page content.
PDF-XChange Editor: A Windows application for viewing and editing PDF documents, with free and paid features. It is an alternative for users seeking desktop PDF editing outside Adobe’s product family.
Camelot Project: Adobe’s early effort to let people capture, share, and print documents across computer systems. The project supplied the original problem Acrobat and PDF were designed to solve.
Electronic signature: Electronic data attached to or associated with a record to indicate a person’s intent to sign. Acrobat’s signing tools brought electronic approval into ordinary document workflows.