Fascination history of the Portable Document Format - a brilliant idea. From Motherboard:
Why the PDF Is Secretly the World's Most Important File Format
The Portable Document Format, or PDF, is everywhere. But it's still a format that causes headaches for the average person.
Just take former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who may not be the average person, but who runs into issues with the PDF just like the best of us.
Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s most recent indictment of Manafort noted how the lobbyist and his colleague, Richard Gates, collaborated on modifying a PDF document by converting the document into Word format, changing an amount in the document, then changing it back to a PDF.
This created something called a paper trail, bolstering Mueller’s case against Manafort.
It's not often, of course, that the PDF gets this level of notice. The PDFs origin story is a bit more boring than that of the MP3, which was built around the contours of Suzanne Vega’s unaccompanied voice on “Tom’s Diner,” and the ZIP file, which came to life in a brutal legal battle that was egged on by the whims of BBS users.
But the PDF still has a story, and that story is that of a format that promises to be even more valuable in the decades to come. Here's why.
“What industries badly need is a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, operating systems and communication networks. These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers. If this problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.”
— John E. Warnock, the cofounder of Adobe, discussing his thought process around the need for a simple document format in an essay revealing the existence of The Camelot Project (which is, of course, in PDF format). Warnock, who was also responsible for helping to develop Adobe’s bedrock PostScript document scripting language, noted that PostScript and its sister language Display PostScript was too heavy for most computers being made at the time he wrote his essay, around 1990. “The Display PostScript and PostScript solutions are the correct long-term solution as the power of machines increases over time, but this solution offers little help for the vast majority of today’s users with today’s machines,” he explained.
A great read.
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