I have a disk devoted to data only (no active OS). Can Linux read and write to files such as PDF, JPG, PNG, DOCX etc created in Windows without changing or corrupting the file's ability to be read in Windows? (assuming appropriate software is installed in both OSs) Can such files be interchangeable between Windows and Linux and remain compatible with both OS systems?

Thanks to everyone for your response.

Yes

Linux can read & write to DOS, VFAT/NTFS, & exFAT - but you might have to add the correct program to your distro.

All the specific formats that you name are common to both systems. Apparently you can now edit pdfs in LibreOffice Draw and you can certainly edit docx files in LO Write. I have heard though that some formatting can be slightly different when you file as docx. All standard graphical formats can be edited in the gimp.

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Yes, I do it every day. There is infrequent minor scuffling that goes on when trying to access some files authored with MS office when attempting to open them through Libre office (Just as newer versions of MS office sometimes protest when trying to open documents created with earlier versions of MS Office) But it's an exception, not the norm.

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DOS is an operating system (and dead one at that), not a filesystem.

In any case, support for vfat (FAT16 and FAT32) is native under Linux, as the Linux kernel has a driver for it, so any Linux distribution should be able to read vfat filesystems. But while the Linux kernel does have a driver for NTFS, it's very limited and doesn't support writing to NTFS. So you may need to install the ntfs-3g package depending on your distribution if you want full read/write support for a NTFS formatted drive/partition. But the ntfs-3g driver is a userspace driver and not a kernel driver. You'll most likely need to install the package for the exFAT filesystem driver, since most Linux distributions don't install that by default.

Perhaps I should have put FAT, but likely not understood as well as DOS.