Adobe Acrobat 3.x

Adobe Acrobat, first released in 1993, is a tool for creating portable electronic documents. Its documents retain complex formatting when used across differing systems, so that they appear identical when viewed on screen or printed to a printer. Acrobat accomplishes this by encapsulating Adobe's PostSript printer language in to a document file format and offering the ability to embed fonts that are not present on the target system.

Acrobat was initially targeted at large businesses that wanted to electronically distribute large manuals and documents. In version 1.0, the Acrobat Reader viewer was not a free product. But once that changed, Acrobat's popularity increased and quickly became a standard.

Word processing documents, desktop publishing documents, or even modern HTML do not retain the level of consistency that Acrobat Portable Document Files do. It also eliminates any need for the user to have such third party software to view or print the documents.

Initially Acrobat competed against Common Ground from No Hands Software and Replica from Farallon Computing Inc