PDF goes to ISO: Some Background
I was on vacation with penguins when Adobe announced that the latest 1.7 edition of the venerable PDF Reference was to be shepherded towards an ISO Standard via AIIM. I returned to a pile of email.
What’s it all mean? I’ve written one article on the subject to offer a little context and to invite further exploration. ”PDF goes to ISO, Some Background“, the first in a two-part series, is now posted on Planet PDF. There’s an interesting post by Adobe’s Andrew Shebanow which describes some of the sentiment behind this move.
For a really good introduction to the ways in which Standards are meaningful to consumers (and how to think about them), look no further than Rob Weir’s great post; “How Standards Bring Consumer Choice“.
The big players in software standards are moving fast right now, and Adobe has thrown PDF into the standards ring at a very interesting time. Other industry biggies, Microsoft and IBM in particular, but including ISO, ECMA, AIIM and many, many other very interested parties, are presently at full squabble. There are serious fireworks between self-proclaimed uber-practical proponents of Microsoft’s OOXML versus the (relative) idealists like IBM’s Bob Sutor who argue for the (let’s face it) far more genuinely “open” OpenDocument (ODF) format.
(Do I show my colors in calling it “Microsoft’s OOXML” instead of just “OOXML”?)
My second article will bring together some comments from a few of the real grandmasters of PDF, and should be ready in a week or two.
