The literature for the scanner I wish to buy says the machine scans to
PDF. I know what PDF stands for but not what it really means. How will
it affect the way I see the pictures on-screen or save them to disc ?
Many thanks."

Hi azzo, welcome to SAF

The ability to scan to PDF means that it has the propers software bundled on it to perform that, so you do not need to have third party converters to do it.

This is an option and will not affect the image quality at all, as the scanning, excluding OCR output files, are always images.

Portable Document Files are normally protected (read-only) and eventually watermarked documents, and may not be changed by most people.

Chris

Thank you.

It is a nice estra for your scanner is what it most likely means. I doubt very much that it would be your only scanning option as most will scan to jpg, tiff, bmp and in that case pdf. Many also come with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which means that you can scan a document and it will usually interpret the text for you into something editable.