We’re now more than 30 years removed from the introduction of Portable Document Format (PDF) to the budding world of digital documents, and it’s safe to say the concept of a universally interoperable format hasn’t lost its appeal. To call PDF “popular” feels like a seismic understatement; it’s ubiquitous to an absurd degree. It’s not at all ridiculous to imagine that everyone in the world (with access to a computer) will interact with a document in PDF format at some point in their life, and it's likely that every modern business depends on PDF at some point as the export format for their various images, applications, contracts, invoices, and more.
One of the major business advantages PDF offers (and has offered since 1996 — albeit under much different circumstances) is the ability to create and share forms that can be filled out digitally. As is the case now with most digitized processes, the manual counterpart to this process — i.e., printing forms, filling them out manually, and either scanning them or storing them for digital or physical archival — has fully evolved into an excruciating exercise in patience knowing that a purely digital version of that experience exists.