A user’s reaction to Adobe’s decision to give PDF to ISO
For those of you producing PDFs, Adobe’s announcement today that they are turning over PDF to ISO should be very good news. No longer will Adobe be the one deciding what goes into the PDF specification, but a standards body will. The situation with PDF will be like other standards, such as TIFF and JPEG. Right now Adobe owns PDF but publishes the specification for all to use.
The bad news is ISO moves more slowly than Adobe, so we are likely to see changes in the spec running behind Acrobat development.
Note: Adobe is not turning Acrobat and Reader over to ISO, just the PDF file format. Adobe will sit on the ISO committee and ask that it begin by accepting the current 1.7 specification, but after that it is up to the ISO committee to define PDF and its subsets, such as PDF/A.
The blog entries cited below have links to all the official documents.
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/
http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/01/a_new_door_opens_for_pdf.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/loridefurio/2007/01/pdf_spec_releas.html
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/history-of-pdf-openness/
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Carl Young
www.pdfconference.com
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February 1st, 2007 at 1:02 pm
> The bad news is ISO moves more slowly than Adobe, so we are likely to see changes much more slowly than in the past.
I doubt that this is true. Do you really think that Adobe Acrobat developers are going to sit on their hands while they wait for ISO to dream up changes to the PDF spec? That seems unlikely to me. They’re going to keep on coding PDF 1.8 or PDF 2.0 or whatever. They’re going to keep releasing product revisions and they’re going to keep doing what they’ve been doing for the last 17-odd years.
Don’t get too caught up in the hype. Yes, submitting PDF to ISO is a good thing. Yes, it will allow PDF to now be selected by those buyers who are more interested in de-jure standards than in de-facto standards. No, it won’t make a bit of difference to the vast majority of Acrobat users.
The main people who will benefit from this are people selling Adobe products. The word “proprietary” always raises an immediate negative emotional response in potential customers. A little explanation and some calm rational thought about the practical implications of PDF’s proprietary nature usually overcomes that rush from the adrenal gland, however that’s not always the case.
The submission to ISO is essentially a “feel-good” announcement that means that the Adobe sales force can avoid that emotional reaction to PDF’s proprietary nature. Don’t get me wrong, submitting to ISO is a good thing but PDF is already a de-facto standard. Making it a de-jure standard won’t mean that much to existing users.
February 2nd, 2007 at 1:05 am
Let me clarify. I agree–Adobe will push Acrobat development no matter what ISO does with the spec. What I meant to say is that ISO likely will move slowly, and Adobe quickly. Users may well be in a position of creating non-ISO compliant PDFs with future versions of Acrobat.
This is an issue that will take a lot of education for users. What’s cool and great in future versions of Acrobat may never make it into the ISO spec.
Having Acrobat and the PDF spec be out of sync may be confusing for many, similar to the AcroForms/XFA forms situation we have now.
February 2nd, 2007 at 1:06 am
I’ve edited my original post to clarify.