By 2001 Adobe's stock price had climbed 1000% but ironically enough the gain had nothing to do with Acrobat--it was all .com hype. Now, however, we are seeing the real gains based on real earnings as their shares have quietly doubled in the last year with no hype. Acrobat has become a standard-operating-equipment purchase for an ever-widening range of white collar professionals and PDFs are becoming ubiquitous. The document-as-form potential of PDFs is expanding the revenue potential even more.

Let's take a step back and understand the history of Adobe's technology to analyze its strength. Around 1980 John Warnock and his boss left Xerox to independently develop a print/page description language (PDL) Warnock had created. This language, to be called "PostScript", was well-received and manufacturers of type-setting machines began to adopt it. PostScript achieved a signal success when Apple Computer chose it as the foundation of their printing architecture. The language allows all the elements of document such as text, images and layout to be rendered dynamically to a printer. The PostScript itself is actually a program that the printer runs to generate the document image. Typical PostScript looks like this:

%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Creator: dvips, version 5.399 (C) 1986-90 Radical Eye Software
%%Title: bigsurv.dvi
%%Pages: 67 1
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 612 792
%%EndComments
%%BeginProcSet: tex.pro
/TeXDict 200 dict def TeXDict begin /N /def load def /B{bind def}N /S /exch
load def /X{S N}B /TR /translate load N /isls false N /vsize 10 N /@rigin{
isls{[0 1 -1 0 0 0]concat}if 72 Resolution div 72 VResolution div neg scale
Resolution VResolution vsize neg mul TR}B /@letter{/vsize 10 N}B /@landscape{
/isls true N /vsize -1 N}B /@a4{/vsize 10.6929133858 N}B /@legal{/vsize 13 N}
B /@manualfeed{statusdict /manualfeed true put}B /@copies{/#copies X}B /FMat[
1 0 0 -1 0 0]N /FBB[0 0 0 0]N /df{/sf 1 N /fntrx FMat N df-tail}B /dfs{div /sf
X /fntrx[sf 0 0 sf neg 0 0]N df-tail}B /df-tail{/nn 8 dict N nn begin
...

PostScript is much more widely available now because various companies have succeeded at length at creating PostScript-compatible language interpreters and including cheap font knockoffs. That this cloning process has taken so long and even now is imperfect is testament to how sophisticated and refined the PostScript language, its font system and its execution are.

Adobe's success with Acrobat is because it is taking this PDL technology from the printer and putting it on the screen. This allows the most sophisticated layout system known to be used to create electronic documents. Naturally when and if such a document prints it appears relatively identical to the screen image because the same interpretive technology is used to render it on both paper and screen.