Adobe Reader 7 Revealed: Working Effectively with Acrobat PDF Files

Foreword

According to the history books, in A.D. 105 the Chinese court official Ts'ai Lun invented papermaking from textile waste using rags. This could be considered the birth of paper as we know it today. Some 1886 years later, in the spring of 1991, Adobe Systems' founder and former CEO, Dr. John Warnock, first described the market opportunity for PDF and Adobe Acrobat in a memo code-named “Camelot.”

You could think of this as the birth of electronic paper.

The Camelot project's goal was to solve the fundamental problem of communicating visual material between different computer applications and systems. At the time Dr. Warnock believed that industries badly needed a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, ...