During the time that MacroMind was taking over the interactive and Web authoring world, Aldus and Adobe became dominant in page layout, illustration, high-end video editing and image editing.

Aldus had built a large suite of products, starting with PageMaker, by adding FreeHand (produced by Altsys under license to Aldus), Persuasion (arguably the best presentation software of its day), SuperPaint, and IntelliDraw.

Adobe started with fonts and PostScript, and launched Illustrator for vector-based illustration. Illustrator was always in close feature competition with FreeHand. But Adobe's juggernaut was Photoshop, which came out in 1990. Photoshop emerged from work by two genius brothers, one at Industrial Light and Magic and the other at graduate school in Ann Arbor, MI. It was an immediate success, destroying its fine competitor Letraset (later Fractal Design) ColorStudio. While other image editors have waxed and waned, like Corel Photo-Paint, Photoshop has remained the tool of choice.

With Photoshop, Illustrator, fonts, and PostScript licensing driving sales, Adobe became an ever-larger company, and finally made a merger offer to Aldus in 1994. The combination of the two required the spin-off of Aldus FreeHand with the rights reverting back to Altsys; Altsys resold those rights to Macromedia the following year, and then sold itself. (Altsys's founder now develops emerging nanotechnology assembler tools.)

Acrobat grew from being a footnote when Adobe first introduced it - with per-seat pricing for every user - to become the world's only real document interchange format that retains the look and feel of original documents. Even Microsoft has been unable to compete effectively with Acrobat, which is saying something. Microsoft hopes to challenge Acrobat with Metro, a tool that will be included next year with the codenamed Longhorn release of Windows.

Adobe acquired Frame the next year, the third remaining major page-layout program developer, and introduced InDesign in 1999 as the successor to PageMaker, which had grown long in the tooth and was being handily beat by QuarkXPress.

The personal computer-based video-editing market was also largely Adobe's for several years, starting from when it purchased ReelTime from SuperMac in 1991 (which was rebranded as Premiere) through its acquisition of After Effects from its 1994 Aldus merger (Aldus having bought it the previous year).

Although there were plenty of higher-end professional video-editing competitors, Apple's entrance into the consumer market with iMovie in the late 1990s and the pro market with Final Cut Pro in 1999 pushed Adobe to refocus on the high end and cut its Mac version of Premiere. In a bit of poetic justice, Macromedia sold Final Cut Pro to Apple in 1999 after years of it languishing at the firm. (Even more intriguing is that Final Cut Pro's developer was the original programmer of ReelTime, and continued at Adobe with Premiere for many years.)