"Kenneth E. Lussier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Personally, I never understood PDF. What is so wrong with HTML and
> embeded images? I have yet to see any real need for PDF's. There is no
> real benefit to it.
PDF essentially grew from Postscript. In the Olde Days, every printer had
its own proprietary typesetting codes, and every application that needed
to print had to implement separate print drivers for each type of printer.
It was a major pain.
Back when i started in college in the early '80's, I heard of a number of
projects trying to develop a standard intermediate format for printing.
One of these projects was Postscript, an extended variant of Forth, and
the guys who developed it went on to found Adobe to market it.
Apple then embraced Postscript and embedded it directly in their LaserWriter
printers as the native print format. Other printer manufacturers followed
Apple's lead, and Postscript became the standard. As hardware prices dropped,
the cost of licensing Postscript from Adobe ($1000 per unit, at the time)
became too much of a burden, and others started writing postscript clones.
Adobe went after them with their lawyers, claiming that Postscript was
Adobe's proprietary technology, but the courts rejected their claim.
That's when Adobe decided to create an explicitly proprietary alternative
to Postscript, which they called PDF.
It was becoming common at that point to distribute documents as Postscript
files, but there were variations in the different implementations, and
hardware-specific features of each implementation that varied between
different printers, which caused a lot of grief and frustration for users.
PDF was specifically targetted as a solution to these problems.
Since then, Adobe has added bells and whistles to the PDF spec; stuff
like searching and hyperlinking, for example.
--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
ICQ 28611923 / AIM abreauj / JABBER [EMAIL PROTECTED] / YAHOO abreauj
Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] / WWW http://www.blu.org
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