PDF developer & Adobe Inc's Co-Founder – Charles “Chuck” Geschke passes away at age 81.

The co-founder of the tech-giant software company Adobe Inc. who helped in developing Portable Document Format(PDFs) technology — Charles “Chuck” Geschke has passed away at an age of 81.

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

In an email to the company's employees, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote, “This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades”.

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

"Geschke was also proud of his family," said his wife - Nancy.

“He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in the U.S. and the world, and of course he was very, very proud of 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 in the world.”

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 (Warnock & Geschke) left the company in 1982 to found Adobe, developing software together.

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

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

Arriving to work one morning, two men seized Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he was held 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.

We at the Su-Niti News pay our deepest condolences and tribute to the Co-Pioneer of the Software Company.