High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Publishing Interchange Language, or "PIL" is a public domain language that allows precise description of the layout of content on pages, groups of multiple pages or any 2-dimensional area, which it calls a "canvas." It was developed between June 1990 and June 1991 by the Professional Publishers Interchange Specification Workgroup, a committee of software and hardware vendors serving the newspaper, magazine and print advertising markets. The committee was led by Quark and Atex.