On September 2nd, I flew to Montréal, Canada, to join a Ghent Workgroup meeting as Chief Evangelist of callas software. Having been CTO at Four Pees for fifteen years, that was quite a change! I’m of course looking forward to working with the callas team, but I should perhaps also explain how I got here, and why this feels like coming home…

First steps

My first job lasted precisely one day. In hindsight, it could have been fascinating, but writing software to be used on satellites immediately appeared so… stuffy and hyper-regulated that after the “getting to know the business” introduction day, I decided I understood it and didn’t want it. For the same reason, I chose to ignore opportunities in insurance and banking, of which there were plenty. I haven’t regretted those decisions for a second.

Physics

I knew that I wanted to do programming; there was no doubt about that. During my physics studies at Ghent University, I came into contact with software development, which instantly was “Game over”. Ready Player 1, indeed. After speed-dating (and swiping left) on Basic and Fortran, the match with Turbo Pascal was immediate. I programmed in that language (supplemented with some low-level assembler) for years. During my master's thesis, I spent about 95% of my time on software development and 5% on science. It's likely the only reason I didn’t cause a nuclear meltdown in the lab…

FirstClass

Someone working at the university eventually introduced me to Peter Camps. He later admitted he hired me mainly because every other candidate came in a suit while I came in wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Probably the last time I won a contest based on looks… Peter had founded FirstClass in 1993, and when I joined in 1996, had a working version of Tailor, a PostScript editor, on NeXTStep and macOS. The technology was fascinating, and there was interest in the product, but the display PostScript technology it was built on was rapidly failing. NeXT went bankrupt, and Steve Jobs killed display PostScript on macOS.

So, we wrote a PostScript renderer, which turned out to be faster than the version of Illustrator at the time; I’m still proud of that. It was also a bit of a jump in the deep end; PostScript was quite challenging, I had never written any code on macOS, and I had no idea of the print market. Being served coffee and cookies by Peter’s wife compensated a lot, though, and seeing this thing come to life was exhilarating.

Enfocus

The breakthrough for this little software company came in 1997. At that time, PDF was discussed as a viable successor to PostScript for the print industry. Peter returned from one of the legendary Seybold shows with the idea of converting Tailor into a PDF editor instead. Instead of making it a standalone application like Tailor, I wrote the first version as an Adobe Acrobat plug-in. That plug-in was named PitStop, and around that same time, the company was renamed from FirstClass to Enfocus.

Contrary to today, PitStop was only editing, no preflight. There was a separate product called CheckUp that performed preflight tasks, but sadly nobody seemed to be very interested in that. So eventually it was merged with PitStop to become the Acrobat plug-in you still know and love today. One of my fondest memories is demonstrating editing PDF with PitStop inside the main Adobe Acrobat window to a bunch of Acrobat engineers at a later Seybold show. They thought we were pulling their leg because “it wasn’t possible to do that”. We visited them in San Jose a few days later to shock and awe more of the engineering team.

Standardization

Around 1999 preflighting PDF files was sufficiently attractive to people that they started talking about standardization. I spent some quality time in the “Kensington Suite” room of a hotel (I’ve forgotten even in which city) together with a bunch of PDF-techno-geeks and helped write a document that later turned into the PDF/X-1a standard. At the same time, in Europe, I traveled to four or five countries to answer the same questions about PDF over and over. That mini-European tour was the beginning of the Ghent Workgroup. Luckily, the two initiatives aligned quickly, avoiding more standardization bloat.

We’re 2024 now, and I’m the Executive Director of the Ghent Workgroup. In fact, since the beginning, I’ve always had some function on the Ghent Workgroup board. I can be very stubborn :)

Penguins

So where do the penguins come from? How are they linked to PDF, and 30 years (give or take) in the print industry? That story goes back to PitStop 5 (which, believe it or not, was the fourth version of PitStop, after 1, 1.5, and 4 :)). In it, action lists were introduced, and when introducing a nifty little feature like that, one needs examples. Throughout the weekend, I made 49 real examples and permitted myself to add one less serious one. I found a piece of clipart featuring a snowman and a penguin, and called the action list using it: “Add penguin”.

The action list made it into the released product (obviously, as I released the product :)), and has caused some confusion since. After all, what’s the production value of adding penguins to each page of a PDF document? But it stuck, and pretty soon, people started sending me articles, pictures, and movies about penguins they found online, or pictures of penguins they had encountered “in the wild”.

callas software

So, with all of this history around PDF, and standardization, joining callas software as Chief Evangelist feels like coming home. Given where my career started, it’s strange to see this transition but to be honest; it was a transition that was a decade in the making.

With its unrelenting focus on automation and PDF, and its highly technical solutions that beg for someone to explain them to mere mortals :), callas is the perfect fit for me.

Their only flaw?

A severe lack of penguins. We’ll need to do something about that! 🐧