You’ve probably heard the acronym PDF, but what is it?

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for exchanging documents. Let’s say you create a word processing file using Microsoft Word and want to send it to a friend, but she uses WordPerfect. Or what if you create an Excel spreadsheet and send it to someone who doesn’t have the Excel program. Well, PDF is your answer. From Word, WordPerfect, Excel, or hundreds of other programs, you can create a document in PDF format that others can open and view in all its formatted glory, whether or not they have the program that created the file. All they need is a free Acrobat Reader to view the document. (It’s likely that your computer already has Acrobat Reader installed.)

Visitors to Church Web sites use PDF files a lot. In fact, since January 1, 2008, visitors have viewed 2,358,619 such files. All the major Church publications are available in PDF format, so you can see them with all the illustrations, photographs, and text formatted just like the printed page. You can see an index of Church publications available in PDF format or while viewing a publication online, you can access the PDF of the entire publication or just a single article or chapter.

To access the PDF of an entire publication: Go to the Table of Contents for the magazine or manual and click View on the format bar.

To access individual articles or chapters: Go to the article or chapter and click View on the format bar.

Once you’ve found the PDF, you can read it online, print all or part of it using the Adobe Reader command buttons that appear inside the window, or download the PDF by clicking the Adobe Reader command button labeled Save a Copy.

Note: PDFs of magazines are only available back to 2001 (because of copyright restrictions), even though the text of the magazines is available online back to 1971.

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