John Warnock, co-founder of the software company Adobe Systems and inventor of the PDF, has died, aged 82.
Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke founded Adobe in 1982. They created postscript, a programming language that describes how pages should look when printed, and later the digital document format Portable Document Format, PDF.
Other iconic programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop followed before Warnock stepped down as CEO of the company in 2000. He and Geschke shared the chairmanship of the company’s board of directors until 2017, and Warnock remained a board member until his death.
“John has been widely recognized as one of the greatest inventors of our generation with significant impact on how we communicate in words, images and videos,” Adobe chairman and CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to company employees.