PDF becomes an international standard

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 03 July 2008 02:10

Business IT - Technology

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has become an international standard - ISO 32000-1 - following a decision by Adobe to relinquish control to the International Standards Organisation.

ISO will now be responsible for publishing the specifications for the current version (1.7) and for updating and developing future versions. The move, according to Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch,  is in response to governments and organisations increasingly requesting open formats. "Maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organisation will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years," he said.

ISO secretary-general Alan Bryden, said: “As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular format is easily available to all interested stakeholders. The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology that cuts across systems and is designed for long term survival.”

The new standard, ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7 "supplies the essential information needed by developers of software that creates PDF files, software that reads existing PDF files and interprets their contents for display and interaction, and PDF products that read and/or write PDF files for a variety of other purposes (conforming products)."

Future versions of PDF will be published as subsequent parts of the standard by the ISO subcommittee in charge of its maintenance and development (SC 2, Application issues, of ISO technical committee ISO/TC 171, Document management applications).

The standard costs 370 Swiss francs ($A378) and is available from ISO national member institutes and from the ISO online store .