Rest In Peace, John.
RIP, sir.
Adobe tools benefited me greatly over the years. They really pushed the graphics industry forward. Acrobat was genius for prepress, yet also for home use.
Hat tip to one of the tech pioneers of the past fifty years
PDFs were one of the most important implementations on the web. The cool thing about them is that they can be streamed out as they’re being built and then wrapped up at the end.
At one time I had read the entire PDF spec from cover to cover and can still navigate the text versions of PDFs.
John, thanks for the Bézier curves. They gave us infinite resolution, to what any device could produce.
Your typefaces were always the bomb.
I have never seen the code underneath any Adobe product, but my experience with them says the code is likely elegant in simplicity. That does not necessarily mean the code is “short”, just, no matter how long, a lot shorter than it could have unnecssarily been.
RIP
I have always hated adobe software. PDFs are a useful format, but overall, the company just seems to suck.
Adobe made computers much easier to use in the late 1980’s. PDF’s are great as well as Typekit, Photoshop and Illustrator. Wonderful programs.
He may have been brilliant, and I hope he Rests in Peace, but I have NO IDEA WHAT PDF IS.
SORRY.
RIP.
My first manager at IBM Research (J.C. King) was a friend of Charles Geschke when they were at CMU. Geschke and Warnock, of course, cofounded Adobe. Some years later, King left IBM and joined Adobe, becoming Senior Principal Scientist in charge of PDF (aka “PDF Architect”).
P.S. (pun intended) The PDF spec is now an ISO spec, no longer Adobe proprietary.