Adobe to standardise PDF?

Adobe Systems is today expected to detail plans to submit its PDF specifications to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a body of particular importance to governments and large corporations.

Subsets of the PDF format have already been standardised, including one for archiving documents. But Adobe customers, particularly governments, have told Adobe that making PDF an ISO-approved standard would raise their level of confidence that the format would be around in the long term, said Kevin Lynch, Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect.

He said: "We've already been taking feedback and updating the specification over time. Now we'll be doing it in a more formal way through a standards body."

Adobe will give the specification that forms the basis for its PDF Reader and Acrobat products to the industry group Enterprise Content Management Association (formerly the Association for Information and Image Management and still referred to as Aiim).

Aiim will host a working group and release the specification to ISO. ISO is expected to form a PDF standardisation technical committee with representatives from businesses and customers, including governments.

The process is expected to take one to three years, Lynch said.

Adobe intends to remain compatible with any PDF standards in its own products, according to Lynch. Existing PDF standards will also comply with any ISO standard, he added.

Document formats have become an increasingly high-profile issue in the past two years.

The open source OpenDocument format, or ODF, has become a viable standard, particularly for government customers. Microsoft is in the process of gaining ISO standardisation for the document formats in the latest version of Office.

Lynch said: "We are starting to see the industry get more interested in these document formats being managed by standards bodies. We see Microsoft responding to that, and we are certainly responding to that, too."

Lynch said he has considered making the underlying specification of Adobe's popular Flash web presentation software into an industry standard as well.

But at this point, Flash standardisation is not appropriate because the product is changing so rapidly, whereas PDF is more stable, he said.

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com