In computing, Envoy was a portable document file format marketed by WordPerfect Corporation, created as a competitor to Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format (PDF). It was introduced by Tumbleweed Communications Corporation in 1993 and shipped with WordPerfect Office in March 1994. Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a science that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations. ... A document contains information. ... A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a computer file. ... A screenshot of WordPerfect X3 running on Windows XP WordPerfect was also the name of a road bicycle racing team. ... Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) (LSE: ABS) is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California that was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... WordPerfect Office is an Office applications suite. ...

An Envoy file could be created by the use of a special printer driver in WordPerfect. The resulting document could be viewed in a separate viewer application, the Envoy Distributable Viewer, which also worked as a web browser plugin. In computers, a printer driver is a piece of software that converts the data to be printed to the form specific to a printer. ... Icons for Web browser shortcuts on an Apple computer (Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox). ... A plugin (or plug-in) is a computer program that can, or must, interact with another program to provide a certain, usually very specific, function. ...

Unlike Adobe PDF, the file format was not publicly documented.

The file extension was .EVY and the MIME type was application/x-envoy. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet Standard for the format of e-mail. ...

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 from the Envoy Distributable Viewer, then converting the PostScript file to a PDF [1]. A postscript (from post scriptum, a Latin expression meaning after writing and abbreviated P.S.) is a sentence, paragraph, or occasionally many paragraphs added, often hastily and incidentally, after the signature of a letter or (sometimes) the main body of an essay or book. ...

References

• WordPerfect's paperless future (Dan Littman, Macworld, July 1994)
• WordPerfect Envoy: Aspiring Electronic Document Agent (Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, Vol 9, No 5, 1996) — includes an outline of the file format
• Re: Envoy vs Acrobat (Chris Hulin) — details the relationship between Tumbleweed and WordPerfect, Corel and Novell
• Company History (Tumbleweed Communications Corporation)

External links

• NAEMT Online's Envoy ® Download Page (National Association of EMTs) — Envoy reader software and plugins