History of PDF

Common card · No. 361078

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). 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. 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. It was created by a research and development...

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