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Before PDF: John Warnock's 'Camelot'

Posted by timothy on from the quest-for-the-holy-grail dept.

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.

2 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. I couldn't live without it today by Choose+Wisely · · Score: 3, Troll

    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!

    --

    Is Linux for you and your business? Probably not.
  2. Open and available specs? Not quite... by Ryu2 · · Score: 1, Troll

    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!

    --
    There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.