PDF is an ISO Standard
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I was up and about at 5am today (don’t ask), and I just so happened to catch a short email in my inbox:
The Portable Document Format (PDF), undeniably one of the most commonly used formats for electronic documents, is now accessible as an ISO International Standard – ISO 32000-1. This move follows a decision by Adobe Systems Incorporated, original developer and copyright owner of the format, to relinquish control to ISO, who is now in charge of publishing the specifications for the current version (1.7) and for updating and developing future versions.
Here’s the abstract:
ISO 32000-1:2008 specifies a digital form for representing electronic documents to enable users to exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created or the environment in which they are viewed or printed. It is intended for the developer of software that creates PDF files (conforming writers), software that reads existing PDF files and interprets their contents for display and interaction (conforming readers) and PDF products that read and/or write PDF files for a variety of other purposes (conforming products).
And what my friends had to say about it:
This is a really strong move for Adobe and for those of us who use PDF constantly. - Blake Robinson via Alert Thingy
Perhaps has something to do with Microsoft opening up their doc specs? - Kenneth Younger
will adobe reader be even slower now? i hope foxit will still work with the flash-enabled pdfs. - mike
mike: the new Adobe Reader coming out is dramatically faster. - Robert Scoble
robert: phew! maybe i can venture back to using it after my tryst with foxit. - mike
this has *nothing* to do with Microsoft… And this isn't really "news", it's just the ISO officialization of what we already knew since December: http://arstechnica.com/news.ar… - Marcos Marado
It's a great document format, even though their own reader sucks, thank god for Apple's Preview. - Gerard van Schip
Finally. The whole industry-standard status was kind of weird since everyone treated it like a standard for years now anyway - Horst Gutmann
At the end of the day, this is good news for consumers; standards are always good news for us. I don’t really see a need to install Adobe Reader 9 on my Mac desktop - even though I just installed 9.0 on Ponzi’s Vista desktop yesterday afternoon; I’ll be content with Mac OS X’s built-in support for PDF. When I want to do a bit more with my PDFs, I’ll use Skim. Here’s to hoping that Flash (SWF, FLV) becomes the next ISO standard!
10 Comments
mattman
July 2nd, 2008
at 9:19pm
well i agree with your friend and it is a BIG move for adobe and i hope it goes well
PDF Gets “Real” « WiredPen
July 3rd, 2008
at 1:14am
[...] 3 July 2008 at 12:14 am (Innovation, Web/Tech) (adobe PDF) In class on Monday, I mentioned Adobe’s PDF as a de facto standard. Little did I know that it was about to be declared an ISO standard! (tip) [...]
Brian McElyea
July 3rd, 2008
at 10:45am
I think this is great! PDF is already pretty much the standard in distributing electronic documents anyway; I’m glad to see ISO getting behind this and Adobe’s willingness to turn the format over to them. It will do nothing but ensure PDF’s success, IMO.
Trackback: http://www.cadfanatic.com/2008/07/pdf-format-beco.html
SmerrillS
July 3rd, 2008
at 12:56pm
Honestly, I think this is not only a smart move, but a bold one. And also, helps those of us out who wish to make our media even more portable now.
Honestly
Brian, CADFanatic
July 3rd, 2008
at 2:55pm
We use PDF for our released drawings; they are easy to share, and provide a modicum of security. And with the 3D PDF capability, you can now share 3D data more easily. What do you think? What is everyone else using to share CAD data? ViaChris Pirillo
MrBen
July 3rd, 2008
at 3:05pm
PDF is an ISO Standard
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July 3rd, 2008
at 6:46pm
ViaChris Pirillo, who rarely blogs about anything non-Mac-related lately:
Tackling Technology
July 3rd, 2008
at 8:51pm
Chris PirilloPDF is an ISO StandardI Think I Want a TiVo? How do you View Web Video and Digital Photos? Isn’t the Wii Fit more Fun than Real Exercise? Am I Sexier than the Wii Fit Hula Hoop Girl?
ParadigmHack
July 4th, 2008
at 4:40pm
Yeah, hopefully all will go well for Adobe, I’ve been expecting PDF to become a standard for a while, since it’s used so often.
blendermf
July 4th, 2008
at 11:50pm
its pretty much been a standard anyways, everyone is using it
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July 10th, 2008
at 7:02am
(07.03.08 11:46:11) ViaChris Pirillo, who rarely blogs about anything non-Mac-related lately: