Adobe’s VP Engineering for Document Cloud, Phil Ydens, estimates there may be up to 2.5 trillion PDF documents in the world. This number is rising every day because PDF has been embraced by businesses, governments and individual users alike as a platform-agnostic way of passing and sending information that won’t be skewed or altered. However, paradoxically speaking, the number of PDF documents could be much higher if there was more awareness about the versatility of the format.
Not only is PDF gearing up for a world with more dynamic interactions between file formats, it can already be used today for digital signatures, authentication, encryption and invoicing. Although a business cliché is that the paperless office is always a few years away, PDF can truly and significantly reduce the paper stack.
So if we take a moment to be astounded at Phil Ydens’ estimate of 2.5 trillion PDF documents in the world, we should also take a moment to expect these numbers to rise once the many uses of PDF become more mainstream.
