When was acrobat created

Please… disseminate, copy, email, distribute, blog, tweet, fax, deliver and otherwise present this information to anyone who still thinks that PDF is proprietary! We all do. Let me explain. PDF is a type of electronic document. The PDF Reference has been published and available since On July 1, , version 1. ISO is managed by industry representatives and others in open meetings under parliamentary rules.

Anyone can observe and participate. Adobe Systems does not dominate ISO 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. 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.

Adobe already had two more-or-less fitting technologies: PostScript as a device and platform-independent technology to describe documents and Adobe Illustrator as an example of an application that ran on several platforms OK, actually on two: Windows and Mac but that is 99 percent of all computers and could open and visualize fairly simple PostScript files, even if they were created using other applications.

The engineers at Adobe enhanced these two technologies and created both a new file format PDF, which is really a kind of optimized PostScript and a set of applications to create and visualize these files.

The first time Adobe actually talked about this technology was at a Seybold conference in San Jose in This first version was of no use to the prepress community. It already featured internal links and bookmarks and fonts could be embedded but the only color space supported was RGB.

Adobe asked a steep price for the tools to create PDF files. You even had to pay 50 dollars for Acrobat Reader.

Later on, Adobe dropped the price of Acrobat and launched the free version of Acrobat Reader. It ran on Windows, Mac, and various flavors of Unix. If you check the records, Adobe purchased Frame Technology around the time of this. I may be mistaken, but I was told by the printer that my book, The Grammar of Graphics, was the first book ever published in full color using PDF. The publisher was Springer Verlag.

The printer was Canadian. I had checked with a number of US printers Donnelly, etc.