It was 30 years ago that Adobe co-founder Dr John Warnock and his team invented the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Adobe Acrobat that allowed sharing of text and images digitally while preserving the original formatting of a document.
With this, they solved a fundamental problem of communicating visual material between people, computer applications and systems.
“In days of proprietary software and formats, the PDF specification was made public on day one for anyone to create, consume and process PDFs,” said Abhigyan Modi, SVP of Adobe Document Cloud.
The technology in Acrobat to create PDFs was based on print pipeline that allowed any application at that time to create PDFs.
In 2008, Adobe open-sourced PDF to the world, accelerating the paper-to-digital revolution and fundamentally changing “how we work across both our professional and personal lives”.
“For companies everywhere, PDF is the de facto standard business workflows, empowering organisations to communicate and memorialise their most important documents,” Modi said in a blog post late on Thursday.
Last year, customers opened more than 400 billion PDFs in Acrobat products and Adobe processed over 8 billion electronic and digital signature transactions.
In February this year, Adobe and Microsoft announced to bring Acrobat’s PDF capabilities to more than 1.4 billion Microsoft Windows users in Microsoft Edge.
Adobe continues to create the future of digital documents with AI-powered innovation.
Liquid Mode is a revolutionary mobile reading experience that runs on Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, Sensei.
“Today, the number of PDFs read in Liquid Mode each month is in the hundreds of millions,” Modi said.
The recently announced PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API uses Sensei AI to simplify and scale the process of transforming PDF content into accessible information, improving legal compliance and providing better employee and customer experiences while saving time and money.
