Happy Birthday, PDF!

PDF abstract graphic

Celebrating the 30th birthday of perhaps the most important file format​

Thirty years ago, the Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed and published. For us, this milestone is a reason to celebrate. Without this innovative invention, we would not have the globally used format that companies and individuals rely on billions of times every day. And webPDF would likely not exist in its current form either.

How Project Camelot became one of the internet's most important file formats​

What began in the 1990s as a research project named "Camelot" can now, 30 years later, clearly be called a milestone. John Warnock, one of Adobe Systems' co-founders, gave the project its iconic name. According to legend, King Arthur and his knights met in Camelot Castle to exchange ideas and plan for the future. Did Warnock already know, at the start, how significant this project would become?

The initial goal was to create a universal file format that enabled highly accurate, cross-platform printing regardless of source software. Later, the focus expanded to document editing and sharing. At that time, many incompatible file formats made document exchange in organizations difficult.

Warnock set out to solve this problem and succeeded: PDF was published in 1993, together with Adobe Acrobat Reader. With that step, Warnock and his team fundamentally changed modern office work. Today, three decades later, PDF is the business standard. It is built into many applications and operating systems by default and has become one of the most important file formats overall.

What can the PDF format do?​

PDF allows documents to be created and shared in a consistent format across platforms and devices, while preserving layout and formatting exactly. This has been a major step forward for digital business processes. We summarized key PDF advantages in our article Trendy prospects. The three most important benefits are:

  1. Platform independence

    PDFs can be exchanged across platforms without compatibility issues.

  2. Consistent formatting

    There is no layout loss. Documents always appear as intended.

  3. High security standards

    PDF files can be encrypted to protect them from unauthorized access.

Continuous evolution to an ISO standard​

After its launch, PDF continued to evolve with major features such as commenting, search, and digital signatures. Digital signatures in particular increased trust in the format's security.

In 2008, PDF was also published through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This marked a major breakthrough for Adobe. From then on, PDF became an official standard and gained even broader visibility and adoption.

Why webPDF depends on PDF​

PDF is indispensable in modern business. At webPDF, PDF is the core of everything we do. We develop web services for PDF creation and processing so companies can work with documents more efficiently and manage workflows more easily.

Thank you to Adobe for developing PDF, to ISO for standardizing it, and also to King Arthur and the legendary Camelot Castle for the inspiration.

Happy Birthday, PDF. We're celebrating you.

P.S. Honestly: without "PDF" in our name, something essential would be missing.