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PDF goes to ISO

This morning (East Coast time), Adobe announced that they intend to submit the PDF 1.7 reference to ISO. In addition, there is a FAQ that should address some common questions.

This is the next logical step for PDF in its long history of openness, and will serve to strengthen PDF’s position as the truly open solution for electronic document distribution and archiving. In addition, it will give others an opportunity to bring their specific needs and desires to PDF helping to drive it in new directions.

For me, this announcement is the start of a journey that I am looking forward to - that of shepherding PDF through the process to being an ISO Standard. I will be sure to keep folks up to date with this blog and hope you’ll come along for the ride!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 1:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “PDF goes to ISO”

  1. pdftrainer Says:
    January 29th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

    Hi Leonard,

    Two questions keep coming back at me from various newsgroups.

    1) What about the XFA spec?
    2) What happens when Acrobat and the PDF get out of sync. In other words, Adobe may be at Acrobat 10 by the time an ISO committee generates a new PDF spec.

    Carl Young
    www.pdfconference.com

  2. leonardr Says:
    January 29th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    What about XFA? XFA is just one of approx. 40 other standards (open and/or published) that are referenced from the PDF Reference. It is therefore in the same category as Type 1 fonts, Postscript, etc. Do you believe that XFA needs to be submitted to ISO as well? Why?

    What happens is just what you said - they may indeed be “out of sync”. Adobe, like the myriad of 3rd party developers have for 14 years, add features to PDF that aren’t part of the standard. And in this case, the standard may choose to add features that Adobe hasn’t yet adopted. I guess I don’t see the problem?!?!

    Leonard

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