PDF. It’s a ubiquitous standard that seems like it’s always been here. How else would you prepare a document that could be printed on virtually any printer or displayed on any screen in the best possible resolution?
But, it turns out, PDF is only 30 years old and even after its introduction, it took a long time to gain traction. When Rich Stevens published the first edition of Unix Network Programming in 1990, he hand carried the Troff output on a series of floppy disks to a typesetting service that printed camera ready copy for his publisher. Things got better. When I published my first book—also written with Troff—I simply emailed the PostScript files to the (same) publisher. By the time I completed my second book, the publisher said, “Just send us a PDF file.” Now PDF is the universal file format for producing human readable print quality output.
The incomparable Professor David Brailsford on Computerphile remembers the early days of PDF and how it completely changed his career. Even he, he says, underestimated how long it would take PDF to gain traction. Part of what moved things along was the introduction of laser printers that, although they didn’t provide the resolution of a traditional typesetter, were good enough.
Soon, of course, they were more than good enough, equaled the resolution of the old guard typesetters, and replaced them. These days, even industrial printers are laser based and all input comes to them as PDF. The ’P’ stands for “Portable” after all and it has more than lived up to its promise.