The article was a rewrite of an internal white paper that Warnock had written for Adobe Systems Inc. (then of Mountain View, Calif., now in San Jose), where he was chief executive officer. From the article and the white paper, Adobe gave birth to Carousel (a trademark scuffle with Eastman Kodak Co. changed the product’s name to Acrobat).

Acrobat produces files in the Portable Document Format (PDF), a subset of Adobe’s ubiquitous page description language, PostScript. Certainly when PostScript was introduced in the mid-1980s, many publishing technologists were aghast: It was not only a page description language, it was a programming language as well.

Adobe’s reasons for making it a programming language rested mostly on the notion that the industry needed something adaptable -- when a user threw a page at the PostScript interpreter that nobody at Adobe had ever foreseen, the interpreter would react in a vaguely intelligent manner. (As a PostScript user, I'm sure you've seen some of the wonderful error messages it produces, he said sarcastically.)

But what startled the experts the most was how verbose that language was. A page that could be described in other languages in a few kilobytes required megabytes in PostScript. PDF did away with the programming aspects of PostScript and included a variety of compression schemes to keep file sizes small. In order to handle the cross-platform concept, the Acrobat application embedded fonts -- the biggest bug-a-boo in digital documents -- into the PDF file.

The initial goal of Acrobat and PDF was just to solve that cross-platform interoffice communication problem. But publishers saw the potential of using PDF in a variety of areas. The small file sizes and embedded fonts were perfect for applications such as the delivery of digital display advertising and the delivery of final pages to remote printing plants. Pieces were missing, though, in the early versions of the application and the PDF specification -- specifically, how to handle color.

Nonetheless, publishers worked with Adobe to solve this and other problems, and PDF began a march to supremacy.

If PostScript -- which has been adopted virtually by every digital pre-press application and operation in the world -- has become the king of the pre-press realm, then PDF is certainly the prince-regent.

In a sort of 10-years-later thing, inside we look at PDF and how it has changed the workflow of publishing pre-press. Our offerings: