There’s an interesting interview with John Warnock (co-founder of Adobe Systems, major brain behind PostScript and PDF) over at Programmers at Work.
http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/
PDF wasn’t around when this interview was done, but you can see in one of his responses he’s talking about what has become PDF.
Tags: adobe, john warnock, pdf, postscriptINTERVIEWER: In what direction is the PostScript language still evolving?
WARNOCK: Well, for the printing application, it probably has slowed down to a crawl. Now I think it makes sense to go into the screen world and give work stations the model that the printer has. There we must adapt it considerably, because of the different requirements of the screen. The requirements are very high-speed activity for certain kinds of garbage-collecting operations, and the memory-management tasks aren’t necessarily part of the printer world. were writing that code and it’s evolving in that direction.
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For those interested.
Planet PDF published the original ‘Camelot Project’ paper written by Dr. John Warnock back in the early nineties.
It’s considered the document that started PDF and begins with this goal:
“This project’s goal is to solve a fundamental problem that confronts today’s companies. The problem is concerned with our ability to communicate visual material between different computer applications and systems. The specific problem is that most programs print to a wide range of printers, but there is no universal way to communicate and view this printed information electronically.”
http://www.planetpdf.com/enterprise/article.asp?ContentID=6519