Why do people seem to insist on using PDF to scan and sent documents?

Ever since PDF became open source, everybody has a button “save to pdf”, and probably alot of document scanners save as pdf default.
also, PDF files can save multiple pages, whereas jpeg cannot

more secure. too easy to put a worm/virus into a jpeg.

I’m not sure, but PDFs can be edited while a picture cannot.

@tinyfaery
It is the other way around.

I mentioned that @tinyfaery. I specified, “Files that don’t need to be edited.”

@tineyfaery you can actually redact a jpeg to say anything you want, but a PDF takes a lot more know-how and leaves a change-trail

No, it’s the OTHER way around @ragingloli!

@drhat77 What do you mean?

@Dutchess_III i can open a jpeg in windows paint, and move letters around with the cut and paste, as long as it’s fairly well aligned

@ragingloli how does a worm get into a jpeg?

I edit PDFs every day. We are not able to edit a Jpeg on our network. It is what it is. Maybe it’s because I work in a law office and Lexis does not allow jpeg downloads to file and serve.

You can do a screen print of a PDF and do the same thing, @drhat77.

@Dutchess_III look at tinyfaerie’s answer – I bet you a lot of corp mailservers block jpeg downloads, probably due to that worm issue ragingloli mentioned, but also so people aren’t swapping adorable cat jpegs

@drhat77
http://www.geek.com/news/updated2-new-virus-embeds-itself-in-jpg-images-549279/
that was from 2002.

@Dutchess_III
yes, but you would only be able to save it as an image file, which you would immediately be able to tell, because you will no longer be able to select and copy text as actual text, even if you save it as a pdf again.

JPGs can be edited and PDFs can be edited. You can make forms with PDFs that can be filled out and then printed much easier than can be done with a bitmap image.

Also, putting a bunch of pages together in one document is easier with PDFs.

PDFs also can have virus’ stuck in them.

Any jpeg can be added to a PDF without loss of quality (or infact altering the image at all) so you can’t use image quality as a decider.

With a pdf you can convert the scanned text into editable and searchable text so if your documents contain text then PDFs are much much more versatile.

If I were referring to blank forms that needed to be filled out on the computer and resent, I could understand using PDF editing. But in our office, the only things we got and sent were, for example, HS transcripts, set in stone, from 10 years ago. They were strictly for our files, no editing.

For something like that, wouldn’t a lower memory file be acceptable?

@Dutchess_III But if you want to search them for something in particular would you rather have to sit there and look at 10 years of files image by image or have the computer search for you and take you directly to the file you need. And if you don’t need to refer back to the files why are you keeping them in the first place.

It’s not like that. Each student had only 1 or 2 scanned files in his or her folder. Like their last HS transcript. That would just be about ¼ of a page, a transcript from 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, and you would rarely have reason to look at it after you’ve dissected it to determine what classes they need to finish their HS degree (I taught at an adult HS diploma completion program.) We keep the scanned transcripts in case any questions arise as to why we did this or that, or assigned this or that class.

Other files would be in Word or Excel that we created, reports that are updated each time they completed a .5 credit, so total, a student might have 5 files total in his online folder.

There just isn’t that much to search for.

But that was specific to my office. A lawyer’s office or a doctor’s office would be way different.

PDF files aren’t that much bigger than JPG files. You can compress them the same way as a JPG.

PDFs are commonly used for documents for many reasons. To name a few: multipage support, ability to save printing specs, and you can mark up a file and provide notation without affecting the source image.

Yes, I got all that @Silence04. But those weren’t necessary in my office.

So why do PDF take so much longer to open, so much longer to send, AND why did they hang up my computer until I got rid of the download?

Adobe acrobat does take a surprising amount of horsepower. If deleting downloads helps performance, it sounds like you are using virtual ram regularly, which is relic of very old computers. How old is the computer you are working on?

Oh, I don’t know. I’m not working there any more anyway. `