Adobe developed the Acrobat PDF software family.
Adobe Acrobat is a family of applications for creating, viewing, editing, signing, and managing Portable Document Format files. Adobe co-founder John Warnock proposed the technology behind PDF in the early 1990s as part of a project called Camelot. Acrobat was introduced in 1993.
PDF was designed to preserve a document’s layout across different computers and operating systems. That made it useful for distributing forms, manuals, contracts, and publications while maintaining fonts, images, and page structure.
Adobe is sometimes confused with PDF itself. PDF is an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization, while Adobe created the format and still develops Acrobat products. Adobe’s other major products include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Creative Cloud services.