Adobe founder and PDF creator Chuck Geschke dies aged 81

Charles “Chuck” Geschke - the co-founder of the major software company Adobe who helped to build up Portable Document Format technology, or PDFs - died at age 81.

Geschke, who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Los Altos, died on Friday, the business said.

“This is an enormous loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he is a guide and hero for many years,” Adobe leader Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to the business's employees.

“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that has revolutionised how people create and communicate," Narayen said. "Their first product was Adobe PostScript, an progressive technology that provided a radical new way to print text and images in writing and sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Chuck instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the business, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”

His wife said Geschke was also pleased with his family.

“He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in america and the world, not to mention he was very, very pleased with that and it was huge achievement in his life, but it wasn’t his focus - really, his family was,” Nancy “Nan” Geschke, 78, told the Mercury News on Saturday. “He always called himself the luckiest man on the planet.”

After earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he met Warnock, the Mercury News reported. The men left the business in 1982 to found Adobe, developing software together.

In 2009 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the National Medal of Technology.

In 1992, Geschke survived a kidnapping, the Mercury News reported.

Coming to work one morning, two men seized Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he happened for four days. A suspect caught with $650,000 in ransom money eventually led police to the hideout where he was held captive, The Associated Press reported.