Every time you hit the key PRINT on most computers, your file is being converted to something called PostScript to output real type from your printer. Real type—none of that bitmapped crap.
The person behind this was Dr. John Warnock, who died Sunday August 20, 2023.
I first met him in the early 1980s when he explained PostScript for me on a white board at Adobe Computer’s first office in Palo Alto, California. Over time I learned PostScript and taught the first course on it at RIT in the late 1990s.
PostScript was to be the output module for a typographic computer system. It was Steve Jobs who told them to drop the system and emphasize the PostScript.
He was a person of infinite curiosity and would wander the aisles of cubicles at Adobe. That is where he discovered an engineer using the object list from PostScript processing which became PDF. PDF has done more to change the way we print and communicate than any other program.
When Agfa commissioned me and four RIT students to write a book about using PDF for input for CTP and digital printing, he was an avid supporter and contributor. Some of those students were hired by Adobe.
I was at every talk he gave at Seybold Events. The most famous was his reaction to Bill Gates announcing a competitor to PostScript. John called it “mumbo jumbo.” Adobe released the specs for PostScript Type 1 fonts a year later.
When Adobe was developing InDesign, I was one of the testers. Every Friday, Warnock would e-mail me with something he had done. I would e-mail back my version and say “Top that Warnock!” And he would.
When I published the first book on InDesign, he wrote the foreword. To my knowledge, it was the only one he ever wrote for any book.
Two weeks ago, Barbara Beeton, who edits the Tugboat newsletter for TeX users, had a question from Donald Knuth. I e-mailed John and received an immediate response.
John and his partner, Charles Geschke, were a great pair. The “standardization” that PDF brought to the printing industry engendered computer-to-plate and digital printing. As well as digital publishing.
We have now lost both Chuck and John. Their memory may fade, but what they accomplished never will.
Discussion
By David L. Zwang on Aug 21, 2023
A wonderful human being, and amazing innovator. Always willing to share and discuss. After Adobe purchased Aldus and they were developing Indesign, I remember one Seybold, where Steve Jobs was going to keynote, and John, Frank Romano and I were standing in line together, and he was telling us how he was using it as a word processor to get to know it. He will surely be missed, but his legacy will live on.
By Jack Glacken on Aug 21, 2023
Remembering John Warnock - WhatTheyThink
I met John at the famous Black Rose Irish Pub in Boston at a Seybold Conference back in the 90s I guess. He and the Adobe folks were coming from John’s Retirement Dinner. Before you know it we were drinking beers and singing Irish songs together. Great guy who obviously made an incredible contribution to the desktop publishing industry.
By Andrew Daykin on Aug 21, 2023
I started my PDF journey with Carousel - way back when Adobe's European HQ was in Amsterdam. I first met John at an Acrobat event in London. Such a genuine man; Chuck had to temper his enthusiasm at one or two all company events I attended. Fond memories.
By Alan Darling on Aug 21, 2023
Like Frank, it was in the early 80’s that I first met John and Chuck. I was at Monotype at the time and was in the process of selling them a 1,000 x 1,000 output device. It was there that they showed me the LaserWriter being driven by PostScript. My first reaction to this was to ask Chuck how long it would take to image a broadsheet newspaper page with graphics. He told me “About a minute”.
I have to admit that that struck me as being optimistic at the time, but we all know where PostScript, and subsequently PDF ended up.
Another encounter with John was when I was chair of DDAP and there was a faction at Adobe that felt the PDF/X was unnecessarily restricting the flexibility of PDF. A group of DDAP board members visited John in San Jose and he agreed with us that PDF/X was necessary for the blind exchange of advertising material. Because of this, Adobe became an active member of the PDF/X ISO authoring committee and eventually leading to PDF itself becoming an ISO standard.
Let’s also not forget Adobe’s amazing contribution to the Graphic Arts Industry under John’s tenure. In addition to PostScript and PDF, there are Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat.
Last, and by no means least, John was a gentleman who has left the world a better place with his and his company’s contributions to our society as a whole. He will be sorely missed.
By Andy McCourt on Aug 21, 2023
Very sad news indeed. I briefly met both John and Chuck in early 1990s when working with my dear friends Clive Goodacre and David Henry Goodstein. We published forward-looking studies on how media & publishing was changing. One thing that sticks in my mind was, no matter how brief the chat with both John and Chuck, you came away with more knowledge, ideas and insights into the future. I looked up a 1990 publication John contributed two pages to. In it, he said: " We have bought the rights to a product called Photoshop which is essentially a sort of Paintbox system on a Macintosh. It won't compose pages but it will handle high resolution images and deal quite precisely with colour."
Marvel at the modesty! John was the ultimate engineer. Invention came before marketing. He is definitely up there with Aldus Manutius and Senefelder as people who significantly changed the way publishing happens. Condolences to all family & friends, we have lost a giant.
By Joe Treacy on Aug 21, 2023
Thank you, Frank.
The contributions to every corner of the graphic arts by Mr Warnock, Mr Geschke, and their team cannot be overstated.
It directly impacted by life, the moment I learned about what was afoot. It has always been obvious to me that my entire career as a type designer was made possible by them.
One of the immediate ancillary benefits of their groundbreaking R&D implementation was bursting the opportunity wide open for highly motivated, creatively-minded individuals to create and offer their typefaces as retail products.
And hand-in-glove with the innovation of developers like Jim von Ehr at Altsys and his team.
How the work by Mr Warnock, Mr Geschke, and their team exploded typographic creativity in ways not seen since Victorian times, has been so much fun to participate in for decades.
As fascinating as it was to order and receive metal and photo proofs from the many wonderful trade typographers that I’ve had the pleasure of working with in earlier days, the stark difference in sharpness of digital type is quite an improvement.
The era of how CAD CAM was brought in as a part of PostScript (and Apple QuickDraw) to clarify letterforms to the degree that designers always wanted them to be, but that earlier processing and repro systems couldn’t fully support until scalable vector concepts were brought in, was and is endlessly amazing to be a part of.
I’ve always been very thankful to them.
And I thank everyone at Adobe Systems over the decades for understanding typography’s contribution to every imaged page using it, and continually working to improve and protect it.
For this typeface designer, you make every waking day tremendously exciting, invigorating, and loaded with potential. I appreciate all of you.
Joe Treacy, Treacyfaces.com
By Dov Isaacs on Aug 22, 2023
The passing of John Warnock preceded over two years earlier by cofounder Chuck Geschke is truly sad. It is the end of the “founding era” for Adobe, a time in which not only printing, but graphics, and electronic communications was revolutionized by not only Chuck and John, but by the myriad of scientists and engineers at Adobe and elsewhere in the industry inspired by Chuck and John.
Adobe's founders were not the typical “fake it until you make it” Silicon Valley hucksters. They were absolutely genuine and dedicated to their teams of employees as well as to their customers and the real value that these customers would obtain from Adobe's products and services. Hollywood façade MVPs (“minimally viable products”) were not their mode of operation.
John actually intensively used the products. Adobe Illustrator was the direct result of John looking for a solution to assist his graphic artist wife in generating artwork via PostScript. He even served as a “secret” tester of InDesign 1.0 (before its public release), asking me to try his scenarios and file bug reports as appropriate. (I cherish the memory of the back and forth e-mails with John on Saturday nights with InDesign fragments that didn't correctly work!) If you were meeting with John in his office, it was not unusual for him to “delay” your departure to show you something “interesting” that he thought should be added or improved upon within Adobe's product line.
Much of my 31+ year career at Adobe involved a good amount of unofficial customer and industry contact dealing with workflow issues often involving multiple Adobe products and technologies. I always knew that I had John and Chuck's explicit and full support in keeping Adobe honest with its customers!
They will both be sorely missed!
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