Aldus Corporation. Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing widespread use in the publishing industry. Paul Brainerd, 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 in 1984 and was acquired by Adobe Systems a decade later.

The company was named after 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius.

History
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.

In 1988, Aldus released an illustration program, FreeHand, which was licensed from Fontographer developer Altsys. FreeHand competed directly with Adobe Illustrator, which had been released a year earlier. The rivalry continued for years, even after Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994, because FreeHand was not included, but Adobe eventually acquired Freehand in 2005 with its acquisition of Macromedia. FreeHand MX was the last version offered by Adobe but is no longer sold or updated.

In early 1990, Aldus bought Silicon Beach Software, acquiring many consumer titles for the Macintosh, including SuperPaint, Digital Darkroom, SuperCard, 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. In the same year, it acquired Company of Science and Art (CoSA).

In September 1994, Adobe purchased Aldus for $446 million. At that time, PageMaker was steadily losing market share to QuarkXPress, but Adobe was still five years from launching their own desktop publisher, InDesign. In 2001, after two major releases under Adobe, PageMaker was discontinued and users were urged to switch to the two-year-old InDesign.

Aldus developed the TIFF and OPI industry standards. The three founders of Visio Corporation left Aldus in 1990 to create the product which later became known as Microsoft Office Visio.

Company name
Paul Brainerd and the other Aldus partners named the company after Aldus Pius Manutius, a renowned fifteenth-century Venetian pioneer in publishing known for standardizing the rules of punctuation and also presenting several typefaces, including the first italic. Manutius later founded the first modern publishing house, the Aldine Press.

Products

Print publishing
PageMaker — 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 — A presentation program
PhotoStyler— A bitmap image editor
TextureMaker — A program for creating textures/patterns
SuperPaint — Painting and vector drawing program
Intellidraw — A powerful yet simple drawing program

Aldus Interactive Publishing/CoSA
After Effects — A digital motion graphics and compositing program
Hitchcock — A professional non-linear video editor, with titling and A/V transitions
Fetch — A multimedia database

Aldus Consumer Division 
(formerly Silicon Beach Software 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
SuperCard 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

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