Discussing PDF@30 Years Old - Computerphile

Professor Brailsford helped Adobe with PDF. His group helped move publishing forwards by publishing a journal about publishing using the actual processes the journal described!


This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[ScarfmonsterWR]

My favourite PDFs are those documents where somebody printed a file from Excel, scanned it to PDF, and then asks you to fill it in on the computer and send back as docx.

[jme_a]

Always glad to see the Prof, he's like a nerdy David Attenborough ❤

[Ripstikerpro]

Brailsford is such a great guest on the channel. Incredible insight and storytelling every time he comes on!

[lazrius]

Professor Brailsford is my favorite Computerphile guest. He is an incredible educator and storyteller.

[DarrenDignam]

Always great to see the Professor speak passionately about PDF (Well anything he is passionate about really!). He mentioned redundancy and archiving briefly. PDF has become a de facto format for document preservation. There is now a PDF/A archival standard - and tools for validation. People print to PDF to save documents for the long haul. It would be interesting to get the professors opinion on this!

[AWSAM]

I use pdfs daily for work and I'm constantly amazed that, even with 30 years to work on it, Adobe can't reliably open and edit the file format they themselves developed without their pdf editor application frequently crashing

[stephenmurray]

I'm grateful Professor Brailsford's learning, experience and anecdotes are being mined and documented.

[hernanrodriguez]

I would love to come and visit Professor Brailsford

[fredhair]

Love this style of video; it feels so much like going round to my Dad's to talk to him about his work as a young man! I love it

[see.m.]

Nice to see Professor Brailsford back! Hope he is doing well and enjoing his well earned retirement

[wyrmhand]

It's always interesting to watch Professor Brailsford.

[ianpeers]

More Professor Brailsford ! - a very warm welcome back, you've been away far too long

[BenOliver]

The thing that really pushed it over the finish line for me was print to PDF. Initially with PDF 'printers' you'd install, then finally built into everything.

[yohojones]

Professor Brailsford is one of my favorites on computerphile.

[SirWilliamKidney]

It is always great to see Professor Brailsford!

[tpobrienjr]

I looked at Heaviside's "Electrical Papers" recently, and I had to marvel at the quality of typesetting and the difficulty of getting the equations and formulae correct. PDF would have been a true marvel in 1900. Thanks for a good discussion on PDF.

[SubThiel]

Love these stories about PDF❤
He is the best❤

A full documentary would be brilliant!

[kapa]

wow Prof. Brailsford is old, he remembers a time when corporations had shame xD ;-) 4:35

[tomgidden]

The turning point for me, after grudgingly using PostScript and then PDF in the nineties with sub-par Adobe tools was Apple's adoption of the PDF model for Mac OS X's Quartz graphics toolkit, rather than paying Adobe to continue NeXT's licensing of Display PostScript.

It was a fast, high-quality, clean, consistent renderer for PDF files and a nice clean, designed object model for the GUI, allowing future HiDPI (then Retina) resolution; hardware acceleration; colour management; font management and so on, rather than a stack of bitmap-based hacks.

Suddenly, creating and consuming PDFs became a breeze rather than a chore. After a few updates, Preview app was about 3 times faster than Acrobat, making pagination finally unobtrusive, and excellent parity between paper and screen.

[EddyGurge]

I just love these looks back into computer history.