Welcome to another episode of TechMan's infrequent series, "Giants of the digital age you've probably never heard of."

Today's subject is John Warnock. It might be a bit of a stretch to call Mr. Warnock the father of desktop publishing, but not much.

In the early days of personal computers, there were few things you could do at the outset. But then applications began to appear. Word processing software allowed you to write a document. Spreadsheet software allowed you to manipulate numbers. Database software allowed you to store and retrieve information.

But one of the biggest advances was graphics software. In concert with the graphical user interface introduced by the Mac, it allowed you to lay out a document in an attractive way and then print it. It kicked off the world of desktop publishing.

John Warnock was pivotal in making anyone with a computer into a publisher.

After graduating from the University of Utah, where he earned a master's in math and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Mr. Warnock began his career at Evans and Sutherland, a company, founded by two professors from the U of U, that made flight simulators, computer graphics equipment and for a short time a supercomputer. (It was on an E&S computer that the first entirely computer-generated film sequence was done -- the demonstration of the effects of the Genesis Device on a barren planet in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.")

E&S is now the world's largest producer of domed planetaria.

In 1976 at E&S, Mr. Warnock worked on the beginnings of software that could control a laser printer. In 1978, he moved to the Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, where he developed InterPress, a language for a computer to communicate with a laser printer.

As happened so many times at PARC, Mr. Warnock and his boss, Charles Geschke, were unable to convince Xerox to commercialize InterPress.

So they left Xerox and founded Adobe Systems Inc. There they developed, from scratch, the PostScript language, which now dominates the market. PostScript debuted in 1984 to drive the Apple LaserWriter. It was a programming language that allowed the laser printer to understand what the computer sent to it and convert it into a document with words and graphics.

Mr. Warnock, with the Warnock algorithm, contributed to solving one of the toughest problems in computer graphics -- hidden surface determination. Sometimes called "hiding," this allows a computer to know what should be visible on your screen and what should be hidden because it is "behind" another object. Although it sounds trivial in real life, it is by no means so in programming.

Mr. Warnock also went on to outline a system that became Portable Document Format, or PDF, Adobe's industry standard format for document exchange.

Meanwhile, a company called Aldus released in 1985 another piece of the desktop publishing puzzle -- the groundbreaking PageMaker software. PageMaker relied on PostScript and completed the set of tools needed to lay out and print a document. In 1994, Aldus merged with Adobe.

Adobe went on to become a billion-dollar corporation with products such as PhotoShop (for editing digital photographs), InDesign (based on PageMaker and used for layout) and Dreamweaver (for developing Web pages and obtained in the acquisition of Macromedia in 2005.)

So the next time you print your neighborhood newsletter, open a PDF document or even read this newspaper (because its pages are laid out with InDesign and printed using PostScript) it is possible in part because of the work of John Warnock.