I love receiving vectors from my clients!!
Other Post TypeI have a client who sends me logos to redraw as vectors which I do at a flat rate and nearly 3 out of 5 times they send me a pdf and the vector is embedded already . Quick tidy up and bill . Lovely !
It’s amazing to me how many people in the industry don’t know that PDFs are vector format
PDF’s can also be raster or a mix of raster and vector.
It's amazing that you don't seem to know either, that PDFs can totally be non-vectors.
Yup. Side note, for any of you who don’t know, the story of PDFs and postscript is super interesting. Computerphile has done 4-5 videos on it cause I’m pretty sure the Dave (the old guy) was pretty instrumental at Adobe in those early years.
One cool factoid, the main use case for postscript (and what sparked it popularity) was to share documents with printers in a uniform way so your documents would look the same on paper and the screen. You probably knew that (after all we still talk about “printing to pdf”) but what you may not know is that the push for this was the first laser printer on the market which was manufactured by Apple. So Apple was one of the earliest and most important licensers of Postscript.
I’ve never actually found confirmation for this next part but I always assumed that’s why Preview had an uncommonly robust ability to work with PDFs
I felt saved when pdfs arrived precisely because of that ability to see what you are going to get in print.
How old are you if you don’t mind me asking?
55
I said PDFs are vector FORMAT... not that they couldn't contain raster elements.
can be
They're all vector FORMAT. Whether or not they actually contain vector elements depends on the doc ...
If we’re splitting hairs, even the Adobe PDF “vector vs raster” page says “it depends”:
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/comparison/raster-vs-vector.html
ETA:
“Is a PDF a raster or a vector?
Most PDFs are vector files. However, it depends on the program used to create the document because PDFs can also be saved as raster files. For example, any PDF created using Adobe Photoshop will be saved as a raster file.”
🤷♀️
Since you’re forcing me to now be pedantic, also from Adobe: “Technically, a PDF is a PS file that has already been translated and laid out on the page so that a user can view all the visual elements. This made it the "next step" in desktop publishing when it first launched. PostScript is a programming language that a variety of printers can translate.” Yes, all Photoshop files are (essentially) raster files but when saved in PDF (postscript) format they become vector-based I.e. they are “wrapped” in postscript (vector).
Oh, we weren’t being pedantic before? 😜
Thanks for the clarification.