Adobe Acrobat (PDF Format) Documents

The Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) was developed by Adobe Software to allow documents to be faithfully reproduced on various types of computers. You can view PDF documents on PC's running most versions of Windows, LINUX, UNIX, Etc., or on Apple/Macintosh computers, as well as several other types of computer.

To view a PDF file you need a software program called the Acrobat Reader -- it is FREE. Before you take to the time to download the Reader however, we recommend you check to see if it is already on your computer -- the format is so commonly used today that many systems come with the reader pre-loaded. One way to find if you already have it is to download a small PDF file, such as this example:

Land Ownership and Chieftaincy Among the Chippewayan and Caribou-Eaters Adobe PDF Text Format

Note that we refer to this as PDF Text Format -- the Acrobat program can reproduce regular text (with or without graphic images included), just a like a word processor document, and this is what we refer to as Text Format. PDF files can also consist of graphic images of pages -- like photocopies on your screen -- these much larger files reproduce the actual image of the original page, so there can be no typographical errors introduced, as happens with transcriptions, but there is also no capability to search for particular words in the text automatically, since they are save as an image, not text characters. We refer to this as the PDF Graphic Format.

If you need to download the Adobe Acrobat Reader it can be obtained directly from Adobe Software.