Aldus Corporation was an American

software company A software company is a company whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry. Types There are a number of different types of soft ...

best known for its pioneering desktop publishing (DTP) software.

PageMaker Adobe PageMaker (formerly Aldus) is a discontinued desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, ...

, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

seeing widespread use in the publishing industry.

Paul Brainerd Paul Brainerd (born 1947) is an American businessman, computer programmer and philanthropist. In 1984, he co-founded the Aldus Corporation, which released Pagemaker, the first consumer-use desktop publishing software. Brainerd has since coined the ...

, the company's co-founder, coined the term ''desktop publishing'' to describe this paradigm. The company also originated the Tag Image File Format (TIFF) file format, widely used in the digital graphics profession. Aldus was founded by Brainerd (who also served as chairman of the company's board), Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman, and Dave Walter. It was founded in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

, in 1984 and was acquired by

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

a decade later. The company is named after 15th-century Venetian printer

Aldus Manutius Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preserv ...

History

PageMaker was released in July 1985 and relied on

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

page description language. For output, it used the

Apple LaserWriter The LaserWriter is a laser printer with built-in PostScript interpreter sold by Apple, Inc. from 1985 to 1988. It was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. In combination with WYSIWYG publishing software like PageMaker, ...

, a PostScript

laser printer Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively-charged cylinder called a "drum" to ...

. PageMaker for the PC was released in 1986, but by then the Mac was the ''de facto'' DTP platform, with

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

(released in 1987) and

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...

(released in 1990) completing the suite of

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...

software. In 1988, Aldus went on to offer its Illustrator-like program FreeHand, licensed from

Altsys Altsys Corporation was a Texas-based software company founded by James R. Von Ehr II. It was an early Apple Macintosh developer and publisher. Three major products from Altsys for PC / Macintosh and NeXT were: *Fontographer for Windows and Mac ...

(which also developed

Fontographer Fontographer (FOG) is a font editor for Windows and macOS; it is used to create digital fonts. It was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd. History Altsys Corporation In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr II founded the ...

). FreeHand and Illustrator competed with each other for years through multiple releases. This rivalry continued even after the Aldus acquisition, because FreeHand was not included, but Adobe eventually acquired Freehand in 2005 with its acquisition of

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe System ...

. FreeHand MX was the last version offered by Adobe but is no longer sold or updated. In early 1990, Aldus bought

Silicon Beach Software Silicon Beach Software, Inc., was an early American developer of software products for the Macintosh personal computer. It was founded in San Diego, California in 1984 by Charlie Jackson and his wife Hallie. Jackson later co-founded FutureWave S ...

, acquiring a number of consumer titles for the Macintosh, including

SuperPaint SuperPaint was a pioneering graphics program and framebuffer computer system developed by Richard Shoup at Xerox PARC. The system was first conceptualized in late 1972 and produced its first stable image in April 1973. SuperPaint was among the e ...

, Digital Darkroom,

SuperCard In sports, a card lists the matches taking place in a title match combat-sport event. Cards include a main event match and the undercard listing the rest of the matches. The undercard may be divided into a midcard and a lower card, according to ...

, Super3D, and Personal Press (later renamed Adobe Home Publisher). Silicon Beach was located in San Diego, California, and became the Aldus Consumer Division. In 1993, Aldus bought After Hours Software and incorporated its products, TouchBase Pro and DateBook Pro, into the Aldus Consumer Division. The same year, it acquired Company of Science and Art (CoSA). During the 1990s,

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and ...

steadily won ground from PageMaker, and it seemed increasingly odd that Adobe — which 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 Adobe purchased Aldus for $446 million. After two more major releases, PageMaker was discontinued in 2001 and is no longer supported; existing PageMaker customers were urged to switch to

InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, bo ...

, released in 1999. Aldus developed the

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word process ...

and OPI industry standards. The three founders of

Visio Corporation Visio Corporation was a software company based in Seattle, Washington, USA. Its principal product was a diagramming application software of the same name. It was acquired by Microsoft and is now in a division of that company, which continues to d ...

left Aldus in 1990 to create the product which later became known as Microsoft Office Visio.

Company name

"Paul Brainerd and his partners decided to name their company Aldus, after Aldus Pius Manutius (Teobaldo Mannucci) (1449–1515), a famous fifteenth-century Venetian pioneer in publishing, known for standardizing the rules of punctuation and also presenting several typefaces, including the first italic. Manutius went on to found the first modern publishing house, the Aldine Press."

Products

Print publishing

— A desktop publishing program

Prepress

*ColorCentral — An OPI server * PressWise — A digital imposition program *PrintCentral — A print output spooler *TrapWise — A digital trapping program

Graphics

* FreeHand — A vector drawing program *Gallery Effects *

Persuasion Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term for Social influence, influence. Persuasion can influence a person's Belief, beliefs, Attitude (psychology), attitudes, Intention, intentions, Motivation, motivations, or Behavior, behaviours. ...

— A presentation program *

PhotoStyler Aldus PhotoStyler was a graphics software program developed by the Taiwanese company Ulead. Released in June 1991 as the first 24 bit image editor for Windows, it was bought the same year by the Aldus Prepress group. Its main competition was Adobe ...

— A bitmap image editor *TextureMaker — A program for creating textures/patterns *

— Painting and vector drawing program *Intellidraw — A powerful yet simple drawing program

Aldus Interactive Publishing/CoSA

After Effects Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Inc., and used in the post-production process of film making, video games and television production. Among other things, After Ef ...

— A digital motion graphics and compositing program *Hitchcock — A professional non-linear video editor, with titling and A/V transitions *

Fetch Fetch may refer to: Books * ''Fetch'', a 2012 book by Alan MacDonald and David Roberts * ''The Fetch'', a 2006 book by Chris Humphreys * ''The Fetch'', a 2009 book by Laura Whitcomb * ''The Fetch'', a 1991 book by Robert Holdstock * ''Fazbear ...

— A multimedia database

Aldus Consumer Division

(formerly

and After Hours Software) * Digital Darkroom photo enhancement software *Personal Press consumer desktop publishing software *DateBook Pro — Calendar management software *IntelliDraw — A vector drawing program *Super3D — 3D modeling software *

multimedia authoring environment *TouchBase Pro — Contact management software

References

External links

* *
Logo of Aldus Corporation
An article on typography briefly discussing the origin of the Aldus logo.
Printed material related to Aldus products
{{Authority control Software companies disestablished in 1994 Software companies established in 1984 Defunct companies based in Seattle Defunct software companies of the United States 1984 establishments in Washington (state) 1994 disestablishments in Washington (state) 1994 mergers and acquisitions