John Warnock, a founder of Adobe Systems whose innovations in computer graphics, including the ubiquitous PDF, made possible today’s visually rich digital experiences, died on August 19 at his home in Los Altos, California. He was 82.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, Adobe, which Dr Warnock started in 1982 with Chuck Geschke, said in a statement.

Until Dr Warnock and Adobe came along, desktop printing was an arduous, expensive and unsatisfying endeavour. Users relied on either a screechy dot-matrix printer, with its pixelated text, or a specialised typesetting machine, which could cost $10,000 and take up most of a room.

Dr Warnock developed protocols that came loaded into desktop printers themselves, and that accurately rendered what a computer sent them. Adobe’s first such protocol, PostScript, went into Apple’s LaserWriter, released in 1985, and within a few years, it was the industry standard.

PostScript, licensed to hundreds of software and hardware companies, helped make Adobe rich. However, the company was largely unknown to the public until 1993 when it released Acrobat, a programme designed to render and read files in what it called a Portable Document Format, or PDF.

The PDF was the result of Dr Warnock’s abiding obsession since graduate school: finding a way to ensure that the graphics displayed on one computer — whether words or images — looked the exact same on another computer, or on a page from a printer, regardless of the manufacturer.

“It had been a holy grail in computer science to figure out how to communicate documents,” he said in a 2019 interview with Oxford University.

Acrobat and the PDF were not immediately successful, even after Adobe made its Acrobat Reader free to download. The company’s board wanted to retire them, but Dr Warnock persisted. “I think the crossover point is if I can go to General Motors and say, ‘I can deliver your information more quickly and more cheaply than you can on paper,’” he told The New York Times.