Aldus

From Free net encyclopedia

Aldus Corporation (named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius) was the inventor of the groundbreaking PageMaker software for the Apple Macintosh, a program that is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing (DTP) field. The founder and chairman of Aldus was Paul Brainerd.

PageMaker was released in July 1985, and relied on Adobe's PostScript page description language. For output, it used the Apple LaserWriter, a PostScript laser printer. PageMaker for the PC was released in 1986, but by then the Mac was already the de facto DTP platform, with Adobe Illustrator (released in 1987) and Adobe Photoshop (released in 1990) completing the suite of graphic design software.

Aldus went on to offer its Illustrator-like program, FreeHand, licensed from Altsys (who also developed Fontographer). During the 1990s QuarkXPress steadily won ground from PageMaker, and 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 merged with Adobe (a deal in which Freehand went to Macromedia). Today, Adobe's competition to QuarkXPress is Adobe InDesign, while PageMaker, which remained a part of its product offering for the low-end desktop publishing market for quite a while, has now been retired. FreeHand is now also property of Adobe after the merger with Macromedia in 2005.

Aldus developed the TIFF and OPI industry standards.