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:

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!

http://live.pirillo.com/ – A word processing application allows you to write some text and save it. A question came in about compatibilities between different version of Microsoft Word, and other word processing programs in general.

Word to your mother! Excel to your father. Powerpoint for your sister! And uhm, Access to your brother? Yeah, anyway…

My first word processing ‘appliction’ was an electric typewriter. Yes, I remember those days well. Slow to start, slow to respond. Kind of gave a whole new meaning to the term “rough draft”. Do teachers still use that in school? No matter. On with the answer!

It’s actually easy to make old Microsoft Word documents compatible with the new version of Word 2007. The problem is in going in the opposite direction. It’s not always so simple to save a document in Word 2007 and then open it in an older version. There are many new features in Word 2007, and several plug-ins you can obtain to make the cross-compatibility easier on yourself. But to save a document in Word 2007 and then open it in another program altogether? Not so easy.

My recommendation is to save your documents in the .rtf (Rich Text Format) format. If you’re not doing much other than simple text, maybe some bold or underlining… this is the way to go. Saving a document this way assures you that you will be able open it using other programs, or older/newer versions of Microsoft Word easily. Of course, if you have a lot of formatting or design in your document, this option won’t work. Another good reason to save your documents in .rtf format is that they are much less likely to be hit by a virus.

Want to embed this video into your blog? Use this code:

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jEwyQriPI3U"></aram><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEwyQriPI3U" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a>

Formats Available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4) Flash Video (.flv) MP3 Audio (.mp3) Microsoft Video (.avi)