Adobe’s Carousel reader came in 1993, and in Mac OS X PDF was built into its Quartz graphics. That enabled Preview to become the claimed ‘fastest PDF viewer on the planet’.
QuickDraw
At the heart of the first Macs, its support for Regions was unique, and it could replay drawing instructions in a Picture, the basis of its PICT file format. Then came Mac OS X with Quartz.
PDF was introduced by Adobe in 1993, when its viewer Acrobat became popular, and PDFs were created from PostScript using Distiller. Then came Preview from NeXT to Mac OS X.
Why don’t some PDFs display properly outside Adobe software? Will PDFs ever become more accessible? And what to do when they get damaged?
I’ve been using PDFs for over 25 years, and have finally abandoned using Adobe’s software. Here’s a little history, and the first version of a new free PDF browser.
The Eclectic Light Company 