In computing, Envoy was a proprietary portable

document A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" or ...

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

marketed by WordPerfect Corporation, created as a competitor for

Acrobat Pro Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (former ...

. It was introduced by Tumbleweed Communications Corporation in 1993 and shipped with WordPerfect Office in March 1994. An Envoy file could be created by the use of a special

printer driver In computers, a printer driver or a print processor is a piece of software on a computer that converts the data to be printed to a format that a printer can understand. The purpose of printer drivers is to allow applications to do printing witho ...

in WordPerfect, and an application for "viewing, manipulating, annotating or printing Envoy files" was included in the WordPerfect Envoy product, together with a "runtime file" that permitted the a viewer to be embedded in Envoy files and enable recipients to have "all the functionality of the full viewer without paying licensing charges". The resulting document could be viewed in a separate viewer application, the Envoy Distributable Viewer, which also worked as a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

plugin. Unlike Adobe PDF, the file format was not publicly documented. Envoy failed to make any headway against PDF, and is largely now unused. Some have reported success in reading Envoy documents by printing to

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug B ...

from the Envoy Distributable Viewer, then converting the PostScript file to a PDF.Remember Envoy?
by Robin Springall, 02-17-2005, Desktop Publishing Forum The PostScript file can also be viewed directly using a viewer such as

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, ...

References

External links

Download for Envoy Reader for Windows 95
Page description languages Media readers {{Business-software-stub