I remember learning PostScript (~1993?) by reading the Red Book, and thinking how awesome it was that this company Adobe, which I'd never heard of, had created a new programming language just to solve once and for all the problem of specifying vector graphics to a printer, and had written such a nice book to help others use the language. It was magical to be able to write a text file in emacs, send it to the printer, and have cool images come out.
Good old days.
btw PDF started as Project Camelot at Adobe in ~1990, as a way to capture the results of executing a PostScript program [1]. I'm curious if there is still that kind of foundational innovation happening at Adobe, and if not, why it died?
Did you ever look in detail at Common Ground? IIRC, it was not only an Adobe PDF alternative, but the format was considerably more modern and powerful. Sadly, it seems like it lost just because PDF was similar to PostScript, a fact that never really made any real difference to anyone but programmers writing PDF parsers. (And PostScript smelled like the future, since Display PostScript was the basis for displays (well, kinda) at NeXT and Sun, and those were definitely the cool kids...
That sounds cool; hadn't heard of it. The web searches I've just tried to look for technical details yielded not much; are there any extant open specs?
Good old days.
btw PDF started as Project Camelot at Adobe in ~1990, as a way to capture the results of executing a PostScript program [1]. I'm curious if there is still that kind of foundational innovation happening at Adobe, and if not, why it died?
[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/2018/06/14/evolution-digital-docum...