Wisdom of the PDF Sage

History of PDF Openness

I thought I would put together a bit of a timeline that covers the history of PDF as an open/published standard, both from Adobe as well as from ISO. After I put that together, I thought it would be interesting to include dates for key open source and other independent implementations of PDF, so I’ve added those as well.

Overview

Timeline

1993

June: Adobe publishes the original PDF Reference (as a printed book by Addison Wesley) following the release of Acrobat 1.0

1994

October: Ghostscript 3.20 (beta) “contains some support for a PDF interpreter”
November: Adobe publishes PDF Reference 1.1

1995

January: Ghostscript 3.23 (beta) is the first release to include “a largely working PDF reader”
June: CGATS hosts the first meeting to discuss the use of PDF for prepress exchange, what will become PDF/X.
December: First public release of Xpdf

1996

November: Adobe publishes PDF Reference 1.2

1997

September: First public release of PDFlib

1998

December: First public release of iText

1999

April: Adobe publishes PDF Reference 1.3
November: PDF/X-1 becomes an ANSI standard

2000

March: First meeting of ISO TC130 for PDF/X
September: Submission of PDF/X-3 to ISO
September: Apple releases Mac OS X Public Beta

2001

April: Adobe publishes PDF Reference 1.4
April: ISO 15930-1 (PDF/X-1a) is adopted

2002

September: ISO 15930-3 (PDF/X-3) is adopted
October: AIIM hosts the first meeting to discuss the use of PDF for long term archival storage, what will become PDF/A.

2003

May: Adobe publishes PDF Reference 1.5
October: First meeting of ISO TC171 for PDF/A

2004

March: AIIM hosts the first meeting to discuss the use of PDF for use in engineering workflows, what will become PDF/E
December: Adobe publishes PDF Reference 1.6

2005

January: First meeting of AIIM working group for PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility)
June: First ISO meeting for PDF/E
October: ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) is adopted