4 ms·
But it became successful long before it stopped being a vendor-locked swamp.
by busterarm 3y ago
But it became successful long before it stopped being a vendor-locked swamp.
- mpweiher 3y agoI can't recall a time when the PDF spec wasn't open, or at least openly available.
- busterarm 3y agoFrom 1993 to 2008?
- mpweiher 3y agoHmm...it wasn't an ISO standard, but the standard was freely available both as a download from the web-site and as a book. My printed copy (version 1.4) is from 2001, and that's a later version, I definitely had earlier, much slimmer books. The 1.0 PDF reference on Adobe's web-site has a Copyright of 1993 and says "First Printing, June 1993". https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandards/pdfreference1.0.pdf https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard... And of course there were multiple unlicensed implementations. Famously, Apple switched from Display Postscript in Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server to Quartz and PDF in Mac OS X to remove the DPS licensing costs.