Todd Bishop, GeekWire:

Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.

He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.

Friends and colleagues this week remembered Brainerd as a quiet, caring and detail-oriented leader with exacting standards. He insisted that PageMaker use proper curly quotation marks instead of straight ones, and obsessed over nuances such as kerning, the precise spacing between specific letter pairs.

Desktop publishing was one of the biggest reasons I obsessed over computers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Though I spent more of my time in QuarkXPress than PageMaker, I can trace my early creative and business ambitions to the software and industry Brainerd pioneered. I was so enamored, I almost started a DTP business in 1991 (even buying Desktop Publishing Success as motivation) before I landed one of my earliest corporate jobs: providing software training and technical support for a magazine publisher that was adopting desktop publishing—an important milestone in what turned into a thirty-year career in computers.