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There can be few people working in any professional environment today who have not encountered the document format this passage concerns. (9) .......... its release in 1994, Adobe's PDF — originally conceived for the office environment — rapidly established itself as the tool of (10) .......... for designers, graphical artists and administrators the world over. The professional sphere is saturated with abbreviated organisational names: NASA, UNICEF and countless others. Acronyms spring so readily to (11) .......... that we often forget their origins entirely.
(12) .......... everyone is aware that PDF stands for Portable Document Format, making it perfectly natural to refer simply to 'a PDF file'. A concise definition would describe it as a file format for representing documents in a standardised manner, entirely (13) .......... of the software, hardware or operating system originally used to create them.
In practical terms, this means that however the source material was originally formatted, once converted to PDF, every element of its presentation is faithfully preserved. It is difficult now to appreciate quite (14) .......... radical a departure this represented at the time — and (15) .......... harder to conceive of a professional world functioning without it. The format has become so thoroughly embedded in daily working life (16) .......... that even those who use it constantly may be unaware of what those three letters actually signify.