HISTORY OF PDF

Free Web Hosting Provider - Web Hosting - E-commerce - High Speed Internet - Free Web Page

The paperless office. Remember that buzz word that never seems to vanish completely even though history has proven that the use of computers has lead to an increase in the use of paper?

PDF started off on the dream of a paperless office, as the pet project of one of Adobe's founders, John Warnock. Initially it was an internal project at Adobe to create a file format so documents could be spread throughout the company and displayed on any computer using any operating system. In his paper which led to the development of PDF, John Warnock wrote: 'Imagine being able to send full text and graphics documents (newspapers, magazine articles, technical manuals etc.) over electronic mail distribution networks. These documents could be viewed on any machine and any selected document could be printed locally. This capability would truly change the way information is managed.'

Adobe already had two more-or-less fitting technologies: PostScript as a device and platform independent technology to describe documents and Adobe Illustrator as an example of an application that ran on several platforms (OK, actually on 2: Windows and Mac but that is 99 percent of all computers) and could open and visualize fairly simple PostScript files, even if they were created using other applications. The engineers at Adobe enhanced these two technologies and created both a new file format (PDF, which is really a kind of optimized PostScript) and a set of applications to create and visualize these files.

The first time Adobe actually talked about this technology was at a Seybold conference in San Jose in 1991. At that time, it was referred to as 'IPS' which stood for 'Interchange PostScript.' Version 1.0 of PDF was announced at Comdex Fall in 1992 where the technology won a 'best of Comdex' award. The tools to create and view PDF-files, Acrobat, were released in on 15 June 1993. This first version was of no use for the prepress community. It already featured internal links and bookmarks and fonts could be embedded but the only colour space supported was RGB.

The original code name for what later became the Acrobat software was 'Camelot', later renamed to 'Carousel'. That is why the file type of a PDF file on Macintosh was 'CARO'.

Adobe asked a steep price for the tools to create PDF files. Acrobat Distiller was available in personal and network versions, priced at $695 and $2,495 respectively. You even had to pay 50 dollar for Acrobat Reader. This approach didn't exactly turn PDF into a popular format overnight. Later on, Adobe dropped the price of Acrobat and launched the free version of Acrobat Reader.

Acrobat 2 became available in September 1994. It supported the new PDF 1.1 file format which added support for:

Acrobat 2.0 itself also got some nice enhancements, including a new architecture of Acrobat Exchange to support plug-ins in and the possibility to search PDF files.

Adobe themselves were one of the first big users of PDF. They distributed all documents for developers as PDF files. Another early adopter of PDF were the US tax authorities who distributed forms as PDF files.

Acrobat 2.1 added multimedia support with the possibility of adding audio or video data to a PDF document.

In those days, PDF was not the only attempt at creating a portable device and operating system independent file format. Its biggest competitor was a product called Common Ground.

In 1995, Adobe began shipping Acrobat Capture for a rather steep 4000 US dollar. At the same time, Adobe also started adding PDF support to many of its own applications, including FrameMaker 5.0 and PageMaker 6.

In 1996, Adobe launched Acrobat 3.0 (code name: Amber) and the matching PDF 1.2 specifications. PDF 1.2 was the first version of PDF that was really usable in a prepress environment. Besides forms, the following prepress related options were included:

The release of a plug-in to view PDF files in the Netscape browser increased the popularity of PDF file on the booming Internet. Adobe also added the possibility to link PDF files to HTML pages and vice versa. PDF also slowly began to get accepted by the graphic arts industry. Initially the black-and-white digital printing market began using PDF for output on fast Xerox digital presses.

In Acrobat 3, the open architecture of Acrobat Exchange finally began to pay of and a lot of interesting prepress xtensions appeared in '97 and '98, including several essential prepress tools. Among them were PitStop and CheckUp from Enfocus software and CrackerJack from Lantanarips. Agfa was the first major company that promoted the use of PDF for full colour commercial printing with their Apogee system, launched in 1998. Other manufacturers followed soon after.

Although vendors pushed hard to get PDF of the ground, the market was a bit slow to react. This was mainly due to the fact that the use of PDF required additional tools as well as some know-how on the file format, its limitations and curiosities. People also got disappointed of PDF when they discovered that it is a very open standard. Although the PDF standard was usable in a prepress environment, there were simply to many ways in which a perfectly valid but non-usable PDF-file could be created

To solve the above issue, a consortium of prepress companies got together and released the PDF/X-1 standard in 1998. PDF/X-1 is based on the PDF 1.2 file specifications but it is a very well defined description on what a PDF file should look like to allow for blind transfers. A PDF/X-1 file is a file in which you are sure that all fonts are included, all highres images are embedded and so on.

Although PDF/X-1 is based on PDF 1.2, a number of extra operators were added. They are described in Adobe technote 5188 and include:

Acrobat 4, internally known as 'Stout' within Adobe, was launched in April 1999. It brought us PDF 1.3. The new PDF specs included support for:

The initial version of Acrobat 4, aptly numbered 4.0, contained quite a lot of bugs that limited the usefulness of the software for prepress purposes. Users got quite upset when Adobe tried to charge for the bugfix, Acrobat 4.05. Luckily Adobe listened to its users and send a free copy to registered users (We did have to wait 4 months or so for it in Europe).

By the time Acrobat 4.05 was released, it could hardly be disputed that PDF had become an accepted file format for information exchange. More that 100 million copies of Acrobat Reader had been downloaded from the web. In prepress, few people still doubted the usefulness of PDF for file exchange, troubleshooting and/or softproofing.