Aldus Corporation: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:03, 19 June 2003

Revision as of 08:29, 30 August 2003

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'''Aldus Corporation''' (named after the 15th-century [[Venice|Venetian]] printer [[Aldus Manutius]]) are the inventors of the groundbreaking [[PageMaker]] software for the [[Apple Macintosh]], a program that is generally credited with creating the [[desktop publishing]] (DTP) field. Founder and chairman of Aldus was [[Paul Brainerd]].

PageMaker was released in July 1985, and relied on [[Adobe Systems|Adobe]]'s [[PostScript]] page description language, and the printer in which it was embedded, the [[Apple LaserWriter]]. PageMaker for the [[IBM PC compatible|PC]] was released in 1986, but by then the Mac was already the de-facto DTP platform, with [[Adobe Illustrator]] and [[Photoshop]] completing the suite of required software.

Aldus went on to offer their own Illustrator-like program, [[Macromedia FreeHand|FreeHand]], licensed from Altsys (who also developed Fontographer). Into the 1990s [[QuarkXPress]] steadily stole ground from PageMaker, while it seemed increasingly odd that Adobe – who had created PostScript, so vital to the working of DTP – still did not offer its own page layout application. This was resolved in September 1994 when Aldus was taken over by Adobe, although Freehand went to [[Macromedia]]. Today, Adobe's competition to QuarkXPress is [[Adobe InDesign]], while PageMaker remains a part of their product offering as well, for low-end desktop publishing.