Mark Gavin

Mark Gavin has been working with computers for more then thirty years. He has over twenty-five years experience in cross-platform development; and, more then twenty years experience in designing and developing applications to read and write Portable Document Format (PDF). In 1988, Mr. Gavin co-founded Appligent, Inc., originally named Digital Applications, Inc., to be a leading provider of server-based applications for the on-demand customization, manipulation and delivery of dynamically generated electronic documents.

Appligent operated as a custom software development company with clients such as SmithKline-Beecham, Rhone-Poulenc Roher, Sterling-Winthrop, and GE Aerospace. Mr. Gavin started working with PDF in 1993, became a recognized expert in security and cryptography in the PDF space, and continues to innovate and develop new groundbreaking PDF related technologies.

Today, Appligent products are used in many industries, including financial services, government, manufacturing, legal and pharmaceutical. In addition, Mr. Gavin and Appligent have led the industry in cross-platform support by delivering its products on a wide variety of platforms including; Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Mr. Gavin’s significant technical accomplishments include:

• 1993, Mr. Gavin built a PDF parser to extract document structure information from PDF files to build search and analysis tools for electronic New Drug Applications to the US FDA.
• 1993, With funding from Adobe Ventures, Mr. Gavin was one of three founders of Electronic Submission Publishing Systems (ESPS) now known as Liquent Inc. He created Liquent’s CoreDossier; a PDF-based publishing application of submissions to regulatory agencies. Liquent is now owned by Parexel.
• 1994, Mr. Gavin developed a stand-alone PDF viewer for presentation to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to prove PDF files can be viewed without using any Adobe technology.
• 1997, Under Mr. Gavin’s leadership Appligent begins its transition to a commercial software company with the release of its first commercial products: TimedOut, DateD, and Redax.
• 1997, Mr. Gavin created the Acrobat portion of Authentica’s Secure Documents for PDF, currently the most secure PDF security technology available. Authentica was acquired by EMC in 2006. The Authentica product has been renamed Documentum IRM (Information Rights Management).
• 1998, Mr. Gavin leads Appligent to be the first vendor to release server-based PDF applications: AppendPDF, StampPDF Batch, and FDFMerge.
• 2002, Mr. Gavin and Appligent were again first to market with its SecurSign application, capable of digitally signing PDF files using a technique compatible with the Adobe Digital Signature Mechanism.

Mr. Gavin currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at Appligent, Inc. and continues to design and develop PDF-related software products for the company. In addition, he is active in the following ISO Standards committees:

• PDF Reference ( ISO 32000 )
• PDF Archive ( PDF/A ISO 19005 )
• PDF Universal Accessibility ( PDF/UA ISO 14289 )

Prior to founding Appligent, Mr. Gavin began his career working at the DuPont Experimental Station in the Engineering Physics Laboratory, Applied Physics Section, designing and building instrumentation for online, in situ chemical processes analysis. In addition, Mr. Gavin also wrote the base scoring software for the DuPont Genesis 2000 DNA Sequencer.

Mr. Gavin maintains a PDF related blog on the Appligent Labs website. In his spare time, Mr. Gavin studies Chinese.