All these people pointing out that PDF was for printing, not for screen display, are I believe (at least partly) incorrect. I distinctly remember PDF being tout

All these people pointing out that PDF was for printing, not for screen display, are I believe (at least partly) incorrect. I distinctly remember PDF being touted as a screen display technology. Adobe (and the world) already had a printable format: Postscript. But PostScript was interpreted and had loops and other programming constructs that made it hard to stream and to add hyperlinks to. PDF was explained to us as 'unrolled Postscript'. PDF was also claimed to be much faster to display as it didn't require a interpreter although NeXT (and SGi) used 'Display Postscript' for their windowing systems. As someone who was involved in print media at the time the font & raster-image embedding was also a godsend but that was a characteristic of the PDF file format rather than the PDF drawing technology. PDF was deemed so suitable as a display technology that the Mac OS X window server was hailed as 'Display PDF' on launch and a big deal was made of how a Mac could not only display exactly what a printer would show but that high-resolution printing was already built in: everything was essentially already being printed to the screen. Although seldom mentioned theses days I assume the Quartz 2D render is still Display PDF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript