computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

, 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" o ...

file format A file format is a Computer standard, 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 format, pr ...

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 Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

, 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, ...

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.

References

External links

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