Before PDF: John Warnock's 'Camelot'

Karl De Abrew writes: "In the Spring of 1991 Dr. John Warnock wrote a paper he dubbed "Camelot" in which the Adobe Systems Co-founder and CEO laid out the foundation for what has become Acrobat/PDF. With the author's permission, Planet PDF is pleased to publish the full-text of that historic document." Of course, now it's 2002, and the dream of universal display / printing remains only partly realized; PDFs really have helped to narrow the gap between dream and reality, though.

Comments

I couldn't live without it today

[Choose Wisely]

Even as a Windows user, I'll be the first to admit that even a standard word processor like Word leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to creating a document that'll display correctly everywhere (even across different versions of Word). Adobe has done some excellent work with the PDF format, it's just a shame that it's another company-controlled format, though at least much better than the Word .doc!

CAMELOT MY EYE

[xxSOUL_EATERxx]

SAME...
it is important to structure Camelot components so that they can be sold in ways that are useful to the corporations (emphasis mine)

OLD...
. If someone produced a CD-ROM with "maps of the world" on it, then one can imagine selling a retail package with one viewer and the CD-ROM. (emphasis mine)

STORY....
. In any event corporations should be interested in site-licensing arrangements

...they start with a genuinely innovative idea (using the rebinding features of the PostScript language to develop documents that can do not require the complete PS parser to be read,thus vastly improving portability, as a much smaller reader application compatible with any IPS can then be distributed), and all they can think about is the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR.

What about truth? What about freedom?! What about human rights, or helping developing countries? ANY hint of idealism is shunted aside. The glorious implications of "Camelot" have been abandoned along with the name, and Adobe is today just another software behemoth slugging it out with the Micro$oft gorilla. Sometimes it's too easy to be cynical.

Open and available specs? Not quite...

[Ryu2]

Ask Dmitry Skylarov what happened when he tried to "reverse-engineer" the encryption on that "open" standard (if it's open, why would he need to reverse engineer it in the first place?)

PDF, open YEAH RIGHT!