Adobe co-founder John Warnock died this week. I normally have no desire to salute CEOs of anything, but Warnock did one thing that had a huge effect on my life.
He invented the Portable Document Format. PDF.
PDFs are ubiquitous now, but there was a period in graphic design and, particularly, newspaper production where the idea of a format that accurately preserved everything contained in a file when it was shared with someone or placed into a graphics file was a holy grail.
From roughly 1995 to 2010, I was deeply involved in newspaper production, especially in the area of prepress. I got a rough introduction to the beginnings of what is called pagination — now an almost forgotten term that formerly had the gravitas of the Oxford Dictionary.
I was working at The Rockdale Citizen in Conyers, Georgia, which I have mentioned here before. During the 14 years I spent at The Citizen it went from Linotype machines, which spit out waxable sheets of copy entered by typesetters. This was one big step above the old lead type that had been in place for decades.
Then we moved to the first DOS-based production systems, using the Microtek system with two whopping 18 MB drives, typesetters were no longer needed. All types originated from the editorial department.
I was in management at this time, and this was the unfortunate time when the next logical move would be to start cutting staff in prepress departments. Who needed pasteup?
We did, so the bean counters had to wait a little longer.
That’s when Quark stepped in. Thanks to Warnock and his team at Adobe, nobody remembers or uses Quark anymore. In its heyday, when we were still using OS 5-9 and struggling with bombs every other hour, Quark mastered the prepress universe.
In 1996, I moved to Northwest Arkansas and went to work for The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas, a much larger company. It no longer exists. The Citizen, in much-diminished form, does.
We were still stuck with Quark, even when we made the transition OS X.
Back then, I was deeply invested in newspaper technology and read numerous magazines (still no real internet) dedicated to news tech (every single done of those publications is gone now). It was almost a lifestyle to me.
I had read about PDFs and how they were going to revolutionize things. Something needed to be done. Newspapers were using EPS files to gather graphics and fonts into a single package, make an image out of them (using Postcript, another technology Warnock had a hand in) and place them into Quark files.
EPS files had huge problems. They were too large (I remember full-page car ads would take almost all night to process on our Mac IIsi desktops). They were easily corrupted.
Fonts were a nightmare. Whatever font was needed by the EPS to reproduce the electronic image had to be stored on the desktop, too. Far too often, fonts defaulted to Courier and images would get the “jaggedies”.
To get around this, OPI software was invented so that the small image-only files in the Quark file could be replaced by the large EPS file write at the point of printing to film, the last step in the process before newspaper plates.
The whole enterprise was fraught with problems. The Mac servers we attempted to use were too slow, Macs could only use a certain amount of RAM (memory allocation was manual) and designers would grab obscure fonts off CD-ROMS at will.
PDFs were said to eliminate this. Unfortunately, they were in their infancy.
Here is where my life got changed. In the late 90s, newspaper conferences were still a thing. The biggest of them all, NEXPO, was filling multiple convention halls and just becoming aware of the internet.
My favorite conference was held in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. The setting was beautiful and the conference was intense and fun. All of the talk was about newspaper technology.
A representative of the Associated Press could not make his speaking slot, so I was dubbed speaker because I had enthusiastically been talking about the future. I am not a great speaker and was nervous as a huge ballroom was filled with grizzled (mostly) prepress and press production folks.
The first thing I asked them was, “How many of you have heard of PDFs?”
Less than five raised their hands.
“You will,” I said.
I have no idea what I said the rest of the time and it doesn’t matter. It was pissing in the wind looking back on it from the wreckage of the newspaper industry.
Two Adobe representatives were in the crowd. We talked and they offered to put me in the early Acrobat PDF beta program. These PDFs, when fully developed and created with Distiller (still there but you don’t need it any longer) would contain the graphics and the fonts in much smaller files. No more EPS files. No more OPI.
I put the nascent Acrobat Distiller to work. At first the fonts remained problematic, but it only took a few versions to fix that.
Soon, I was traveling Arkansas and Oklahoma to help other newspapers with their full pagination transition, which unfortunately killed a lot of jobs. Some of it was premature. All were inevitable.
Hot on the heels of Acrobat came InDesign, which could natively place and create PDFs, something Quark waited way too long to do.
Voila! Warnock had a billion-dollar company.
And I got a job at The Santa Fe New Mexican. Santa Fe utterly changed me - spiritually, politically and emotionally.
All because I asked an impromptu question.
Back to Journey, American next week.
Great insight into the industry, Jeff. Thanks for sharing. I was a newspaper reader. Fond memories.
Even those of us who suffered through the early days of personal computers forget the steps along the way - it is good to remember, and remember how much better it is now. Learning HTML just so you could send an email 🤣. The change in technology for the newspapers in the UK caused the loss of many employees, strikes, and relocation from old printing buildings in the centre of London to the outskirts.