News
PDF Now ISO Standard
- By Joab Jackson
- July 07, 2008
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the PDF
as a standard format for electronic documents. ISO has christened version 1.7
of PDF, the current working version,
ISO
32000-1.
"As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular
format is easily available to all interested stakeholders," said ISO Secretary-General
Alan Bryden in a statement. "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.”
Developed by Adobe Systems, PDF is a digital document format designed to preserve
the layout and appearance of an electronic document -- or the scanned version
of a paper document -- on different platforms. Adobe submitted the format to
ISO for standardization in February 2007.
With Adobe relinquishing control of PDF, the ISO Document Management Applications
Technical Committee will review any changes made to the format. The openly published
standard provides the technical information required for writing software programs
that can create and read PDF files, ensuring that organizations will always
have some tools available to render PDFs, even if Adobe stops shipping its PDF
viewer.
This is not the first version of PDF to be under ISO's care. The organization
also oversees PDF/X, a subset for the printing industry, and PDF/A, for long-term
archiving of documents.
In related news, Adobe has released the latest version of its free PDF viewer,
Adobe
Reader. The new version is the first to support PDFs with embedded interactive
Flash animations, a feature made available with the recently released version
9 of Adobe's Acrobat PDF creator. The new reader also allows multiple users
to annotate and update documents through the company's online collaboration
service, Acrobat.com.
"PDF documents are well beyond simple visual representation of paper on
a screen," said Bobby Caudill, group manager of global government solutions
at Adobe.
About the Author
Joab Jackson is the chief technology editor of Government Computing News (GCN.com).