In
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...
, Envoy was a proprietary portable
document
A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" or ...
file format
A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free.
Some file formats ...
marketed by
WordPerfect Corporation, created as a competitor for
Acrobat Pro. It was introduced by
Tumbleweed Communications Corporation in 1993 and shipped with
WordPerfect Office in March 1994.
An Envoy file could be created by the use of a special
printer driver
In computers, a printer driver or a print processor is a piece of software on a computer that converts the data to be printed to a format that a printer can understand. The purpose of printer drivers is to allow applications to do printing withou ...
in WordPerfect, and an application for "viewing, manipulating, annotating or printing Envoy files" was included in the WordPerfect Envoy product, together with a "runtime file" that permitted the a viewer to be embedded in Envoy files and enable recipients to have "all the functionality of the full viewer without paying licensing charges".
The resulting document could be viewed in a separate viewer application, the Envoy Distributable Viewer, which also worked as a
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
plugin.
Unlike
Adobe PDF, the file format was not publicly documented.
Envoy failed to make any headway against PDF, and is largely now unused. Some have reported success in reading Envoy documents by printing to
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 ...
from the Envoy Distributable Viewer, then converting the PostScript file to a PDF.
Remember Envoy?
by Robin Springall, 02-17-2005, Desktop Publishing Forum The PostScript file can also be viewed directly using a viewer such as Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language file ...
.
References
External links
Download for Envoy Reader for Windows 95
Page description languages
Media readers
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