Adobe co-founder ushered in desktop publishing

As a young man in Cleveland, Charles Geschke was fascinated by the science behind letterpress printing. His father and grandfather were both photoengravers, and the family seemed to have a special talent for using copper plates to transfer images onto newspaper, book and magazine pages. But his father urged him not to enter the printing industry, calling it “a dirty business” and telling him to “stick to the books and find something else to do.”

Geschke followed that advice, up to a point. After studying for the priesthood and then earning a classics degree, he decided on a career trajectory more practical than ancient Greek and Latin. Armed with advanced degrees in math and computer science, he became a research scientist at Xerox. In 1982, he partnered with a colleague, John Warnock, to co-found Adobe Systems, a Silicon Valley start-up that they named for a creek near their homes in Los Altos, Calif. Their first product, a computer language known as PostScript, enabled people to print documents just as they appeared on a computer screen, using any brand of printer — and brought Geschke into the industry his father had warned him against.

The technology upended mechanical printing, ushered in a desktop publishing revolution and astonished Geschke’s father, who took out his loupe, examined a set of characters printed with PostScript and declared that their quality “would be good enough for fine printing,” as Geschke’s wife, Nan, recalled in an interview. Geschke helped build Adobe into one of the world’s largest software companies, with a current market value of about $250 billion. He served as Adobe’s chief operating officer, president and cochairman before his death April 16 at age 81, at his home in Los Altos. He had melanoma, Nan Geschke said.