Using electronic resources

PDF - Portable Document Format

PDF (acronym for Portable Document Format) from Adobe Acrobat is increasingly becoming the most common format to transmit books and articles over the Internet. All Jstor articles are in this format, in France the Bibliothèque Nationale has already digitised thousand of books in this format, which can be downloaded for free from the Gallica website.

To read a pdf file you need to have the Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. You can download it for free from the Adobe website.

Acrobat Reader provides an interface to consult and annotate electronic texts. You can jump quickly from one page to another. You can zoom in and out or read in full screen mode. A comprehensive help manual comes with the software and it is worth spending time familiarising yourself with the various options of the menus.

If you wanted to create PDF files from scanned images or text files you would need the Professional version of Adobe Acrobat.