PDF's adoption in the early days of the format's history was slow.

In those early years before the rise of the World Wide Web and HTML documents, PDF was popular mainly in desktop publishing workflows. PDF was one among a number of competing formats such as DjVu, Envoy, Common Ground Digital Paper, Farallon Replica and even Adobe's own PostScript format. It was created by a research and development team called Camelot, led by Adobe's co-founder John Warnock.

PDF was developed to share documents, including text formatting and inline images, among computer users of disparate platforms who may not have access to mutually-compatible application software. Since then, it is under the control of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Committee of volunteer industry experts. The Portable Document Format (PDF) was created by Adobe Systems, introduced at the Windows and OS/2 Conference in January 1993 and remained a proprietary format until it was released as an open standard in 2008.

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