Envoy (WordPerfect)

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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.

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.

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

The file extension was .EVY and the MIME type was application/x-envoy.

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].

[edit] 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)