Origin of PDF

Origin of PDF

Here you would get an overview of the origins of Portable Document Format and the twin Adobe Acrobat tool. Paperless office! You must have encountered these two words and pondered if it could be a reality someday. There has been a buzz that usage of computers has been able to reduce the usage of paper by people because the tasks, which needed paper usage has been reduced and replaced by computers. PDF initiated the realization of offices which made lesser usage of paper since the project of one of the founders of Adobe, John Warnock helped in doing so.

It was at first an international project of creating a file format that would help documents in spreading all through the firm and also so that they get displayed on any given computer using any given operating system. John Warnock, in his paper that started the developmental process of this format wrote as if speaking to people ‘Imagine being capable of sending full text and graphics documents like journals, newspapers, technical manuals, etc. across various platforms without any trouble.’ It is not just sending but also making the viewing process easy that was targeted whilst the format was under developmental procedure. Selected documents could as well be printed locally. So the true change in the method of sending information would absolutely be a reality.

Before this, Adobe had two fitting technologies which are PostScript as a device and platform-independent technology that would describe various documents and another is Adobe Illustrator. This was example of an application that easily would run on various platforms but mainly on Windows and Mac, which is 99% of all computers, where opening and visualizing simplest of PostScript files could be done even if they were created using some other applications. The expert engineers working at Adobe improved the technologies and then created a novel file format and a set of other applications to visualize and develop these files. The original code name initially for Acrobat software was ‘Camelot’. Using PDF converter for document conversions is extensively done by many all through the world and the one strong reason is the level of protection that it offers in protecting the file content.