History of PDF
History of the computer file format / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about History of PDF?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
The Portable Document Format (PDF) was created by Adobe Systems, introduced at the Windows and OS/2 Conference in January 1993 and remained a proprietary format until it was released as an open standard in 2008. Since then, it has been under the control of an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee of industry experts.
Development of PDF began in 1991 when Adobe's co-founder John Warnock wrote a paper for a project then code-named Camelot, in which he proposed the creation of a simplified version of Adobe's PostScript format called Interchange PostScript (IPS).[1] Unlike traditional PostScript, which was tightly focused on rendering print jobs to output devices, IPS would be optimized for displaying pages to any screen and any platform.[1]
PDF was developed to share documents, including text formatting and inline images, among computer users of disparate platforms who may not have access to mutually-compatible application software.[2] It was created by a research and development team called Camelot,[3] which was personally led by Warnock himself. PDF was one of a number of competing electronic document formats in that era such as DjVu, Envoy, Common Ground Digital Paper, Farallon Replica and traditional PostScript itself. In those early years before the rise of the World Wide Web and HTML documents, PDF was popular mainly in desktop publishing workflows.
PDF's adoption in the early days of the format's history was slow.[4] Indeed, the Adobe Board of Directors attempted to cancel the development of the format, as they could see little demand for it.[5] Adobe Acrobat, Adobe's suite for reading and creating PDF files, was not freely available; early versions of PDF had no support for external hyperlinks, reducing its usefulness on the Internet; the larger size of a PDF document compared to plain text required longer download times over the slower modems common at the time; and rendering PDF files was slow on the less powerful machines of the day.
Adobe distributed its Adobe Reader (now Acrobat Reader) program free of charge from version 2.0 onwards,[6] and continued supporting the original PDF, which eventually became the de facto standard for fixed-format electronic documents.[7]
In 2008 Adobe Systems' PDF Reference 1.7 became ISO 32000:1:2008. Thereafter, further development of PDF (including PDF 2.0) is conducted by ISO's TC 171 SC 2 WG 8 with the participation of Adobe Systems and other subject matter experts.