“If anyone had told me 20 years ago that we would have a fundamental impact on the publishing industry, I wouldn’t have believed them.” JOHN WARNOCK CO-FOUNDER ADOBE SYSTEMSīeyond high costs, proprietary typesetting systems also restricted creativity due to their limited font libraries. These systems’ steep initial investment and operating costs alienated many potential participants from the publishing business. At the time, typesetting systems cost $200,000 – $300,000 and required specially trained operators capable of programming the system with its unique language. This process was inefficient and exceedingly expensive. Content destined for multiple output devices required multiple sets of software instructions – one for each device. In the early 1980’s, state-of-the-art digital typesetting and page composition devices each had their own proprietary page description language that created and printed pages. Although skilled craftsmen could produce beautiful work with this technique, the cumbersome and labor-intensive process severely hindered creativity and productivity. This watershed achievement not only freed print professionals from the constraints of proprietary output systems, it forever changed the workflow of content creators and publishers and ushered in a new era of communication. With PostScript, printers and publishers were finally able to describe all the content on an electronic page independent of its final output destination. In 1984, five visionaries at Adobe – John Warnock, Chuck Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton – authored the revolutionary PostScript, a deviceindependent page description language that would soon become the industry standard for printing rich text and graphical content. It’s been 20 years since Adobe PostScript software was introduced and indelibly changed the printing and publishing industry for all time. The board was then photographed and the resulting image was When final projects combined elements of text, photographs, and line art, a publisher’s only option was to output each component on a different proprietary system and to manually assemble them all on a single pasteup board using an X-Acto knife, tape, and glue. The inclusion of line art and other graphics required yet a third process – typically involving pen and ink and a very steady hand. While pages of text could be assembled on a computer, adding photos to the page required a separate optical/ chemical workflow. Pre-Revolutionary Times Prior to the introduction of PostScript, publishing systems relied on a strictly mechanical process employing a mix of handset type and proprietary typesetting systems. Adobe Celebrates Two Decades of Publishing Revolution
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