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30 years: PDF changed the print industry
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The year 1993 also saw the launch of HTML hyper text mark-up language, and together the two developments have formed the bedrock of the communication world we know today. PDF enabled documents to be created with text and images, and to be locked or open, independent of application software, hardware or operating system. Each PDF has a complete description of a fixed layout flat document.Adobe’s PDF portable document format launch onto an unsuspecting world at the same time the internet emerged. Ironically,
PDF came as part of the move to shake print free of the hugely expensive proprietary page make-up systems, with desktop publishing . Today almost all printed pages are first created as PDFs, putting immense power in the hands of its owner Adobe, which launched it as a free-of-charge proprietary software, but 15 years later made it open source.