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Notes

The History of PDF

he paperless office. Remember that buzz word that never seems to vanish completely
even though history has proven that the use of computers has until now only lead to
Tan increase in the use of paper?
PDF started off on the dream of a paperless office, as the pet project of one of Adobe’s
founders, John Warnock. Initially it was an internal project at Adobe to create a file format so
documents could be spread throughout the company and displayed on any computer using
any operating system. In his paper which led to the development of PDF, John Warnock
wrote: ‘Imagine being able to send full text and graphics documents (newspapers, magazine
articles, technical manuals etc.) over electronic mail distribution networks. These documents
could be viewed on any machine and any selected document could be printed locally. This
capability would truly change the way information is managed.’
PDF 1.0

The first time Adobe actually talked about this technology was at a Seybold conference in San
Jose in 1991. At that time, it was referred to as ‘IPS’ which stood for ‘Interchange PostScript.’
Version 1.0 of PDF was announced at Comdex Fall in 1992 where the technology won a
‘best of Comdex’ award. The tools to create and view PDF-files, Acrobat, were released in
on 15 June 1993. This first version was of no use for the prepress community. It already
featured internal links and bookmarks and fonts could be embedded but the only color
space supported was RGB.

PDF 1.1
Acrobat 2 became available in November 1994. It supported the new PDF 1.1 file format
which added support for:
• external links

• article threads
• security features
• device independent color
• notes
Acrobat 2.0 itself also got some nice enhancements, including a new architecture of Acrobat
Exchange to support plug-ins in and the possibility to search PDF files.
Acrobat 2.1 added multimedia support with the possibility of adding audio or video data
to a PDF document.

PDF 1.2 the prepress world wakes up
In November 1996, Adobe launched Acrobat 3.0 (code name: Amber) and the matching PDF
1.2 specifications. PDF 1.2 was the first version of PDF that was really usable in a prepress
environment. Besides forms, the following prepress related options were included:
• support for OPI 1.3 specifications
• support for the CMYK colour space
• spot colors could be maintained in a PDF

• halftone functions could be included as well as overprint instructions. Contd...

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