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 much more slowly than in the past. 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/ Tell 'em I sent you... -------------------------------------------------- Carl Young www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/pdftrainer www.pdftrain.com www.pdfconference.com --------------------------------------------------
