POSTSCRIPT AND PDF CREATOR WARNOCK PASSES AWAY

John Warnock, one of the architects of Postscript and the PDF, and co-founder of Adobe Systems, has passed away, aged 82, two years after his co-founder Chuck Geschke died.

Warnock and Geschke’s creations have had a profound and universal impact on the print industry, with almost every piece of print now saved as PDF prior to prepress. They created PostScript, which enabled the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s, and then a decade later they came up with the PDF, which quickly became ubiquitous in the commercial print industry.

They followed this with other equally ubiquitous sector changing programmes, such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

A self-described geek, Warnock said he only had an average understanding of maths, until he was taken under the wing of an inspirational teacher.

Born in 1941, he moved to the legendary Palo Alto Xerox centre in the 1970s, where he met Geschke, and the duo began working on InterPress, a printing and graphics protocol that they were certain would be the future. Xerox though was not convinced, so they left to create their own company, founding Adobe in 1982. Their company is today worth US$237bn, ten times more than Xerox, and has 29,000 staff. Its products are used by almost every printer and designer in the world.

Warnock stepped down as Adobe CEO in 2000, although both he and Geschke remained as co-chairs of the company’s board of directors until 2017, and Warnock a board member right up to his death.

The term 'revolutionary' is attributed to virtually every new development in print these days, almost from an adjustment in the size of a widget. In reality, few people in the entire history of print can have that moniker attached to their work, but Warnock and Geschke certainly can; Postscript and the PDF transformed print, Photoshop killed off the century-old notion that the camera never lies, and Illustrator totally dominates graphic design.