Wiping away your previous OS is a big step that you don't want to
do unless you are quite sure.

No.
assuming you have spare space on your hard drive
install ubuntu as dual boot
then it will ask you on boot windows or ubuntu.
http://www.libreoffice.org/ will do all pdf stuff,
or scribus for DTP.

You can carry on using windows whilst you learn how to use ubuntu software
center etc.

ubuntu should be able to read everything from your windows my documents
folder.