Back in the 1990’s when working in Technical Support for Adobe I volunteered to write the Question and Answer section for PageMaker in Adobe magazine. Gen X oldsters may recall that Adobe acquired Aldus around November of 1994, which corresponds with Aldus Magazine’s transition to Adobe Magazine. My first few columns were about PageMaker, which I supported at the time. Shortly after the acquisition I was tapped on the shoulder to support Acrobat on the phones and write about Acrobat, which was version 1.0 at the time, in the magazine. I recall Adobe going all-in on Acrobat to create a standard file format for distributing documents of all types, similarly to how they created a high-end printing standard using the PostScript printing computer language. Looking back and remembering how new the product was at the time, it’s impressive to see how well they succeeded.
Each column I wrote will be posted on this blog as fast as I can scan them and harvest their content using Acrobat’s OCR functionality. Even if the topics are far outdated, my hope is they serve as good samples of my tech writing. They also are mini time capsules of technology at the dawn of the internet explosion. These are from pre-Amazon and pre-Google days, and I find some of the advertising striking the same way the advertising in old Life magazines in my grandparents’ basement appealed to me as a kid. Along with the text, each post will also contain the scanned PDF to display the old ads and images that went with the articles.
PageMaker Q&A columns:
- Adobe Magazine Jan/Feb 1995 PageMaker Q&A
- Adobe Magazine Mar/Apr 1995 PageMaker Q&A
- Adobe Magazine May/Jun 1995 PageMaker Q&A
Acrobat Q&A columns:
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