If approved in 15 to 30 months, the whole PDF spec will be considered an international standard.People with differing definitions of what makes an open standard truly "open" will still be able to argue about PDF until they're blue in the face, but moves made Jan. 29 by Adobe Systems and the Association for Information and Image Management will make PDF more closely resemble an open standard.
With Adobe's blessing, the trade group plans to submit the entire PDF
1.7 file spec—the current version released with Acrobat 8—to the ISO (which, standards buffs will tell you doesn't stand for the obvious "International Standards Organization" but instead just refers to the Greek word for "equal"). The international standards cabal could approve PDF as a standard after a likely 15 to 30 months' worth of reviewing and refining.
Pieces of PDF Already ISO Standards
Several trade-specific subsets of the PDF spec are either ISO approved or in the approval process, including PDF/X for printers, PDF/E for engineers, PDF/A for archivists and PDF/UA for making documents compliant with Section 508 regulations. The ISO review and approval process doesn't take a set amount of time, but typically takes somewhere between 15 and 30 months, says Adobe's Sarah Rosenbaum, director of Acrobat product management.
Technically, Adobe isn't submitting PDF directly to ISO, but rather through an AIIM working group, on which Adobe has a seat. AIIM serves as the administrator for the PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/UA standards and also for PDF/H, an emerging standard for health care. Adobe and AIIM first started working together on standards for ISO submission back in 1995.
"As we have seen this evolve over time, what's happening is that there are these specific standards being developed for specific applications based on PDF," Rosenbaum says. "There is a constituency of customers and governments out there who need a broader standard of PDF to be able to conduct broader business. Broader than just archiving, or just advertising distribution. It's just a logical next step."
Possible Boosts for End Users, Vendors
End users of Acrobat or other PDF applications won't likely get a direct immediate benefit from ISO approval; the PDF spec addresses arcane issues of document architecture more than it does software features.
An indirect benefit, though, says analyst Melissa Webster, IDC's Content & Digital Media Technologies program director, is that it would help eliminate the confusion among users and vendors in the Java and Unix worlds, where several competing flavors test loyalties—or sometimes require people to purchase multiple versions of software.
"When software vendors take a published spec and then add to it, they may feel they are 'improving' it," Webster says. "But if they incorporate their changes to it in a series of products that become a 'de facto' standard, it creates a conflicting version of that spec—a new code fork."
The move could be a good boost for Adobe, however, as it looks to distance itself in the workplace from competing document technologies, most of which are johnny-come-latelys and probably would be years away from being ISO-worthy.
Some governments, corporations and international organizations require ISO-standard processes wherever possible; approving PDF as an ISO standard would make it an actual standard as opposed to the de facto standard it is now—one most people use, even though it hasn't been officially ratified by an ISO.
Next Page: Let the open standard debate begin.
Let the Open Standard Debate Begin
What is an open standard? In the past, it could be argued that PDF wasn't an open standard; it was something Adobe published, and upon it Adobe and third-party software developers built apps and plug-ins. Some people described PDF as a "privately owned, public standard," avoiding the word "open" altogether.
Adobe still owns the PDF spec and will continue developing it. Yet turning it over to the AIIM committee and ISO seems to be ceding some control over future iterations of the spec to forces outside the company—and opening it a lot more than it was in years past.
"I think Adobe has been going down this path for years with the other PDF ISO standards efforts, so I don't think this marks any change in strategy," Webster says. "The spec is very robust now, and mature. So I think Adobe decided they were ready for this next inevitable step. And yes, I think Adobe would agree that there is value in the ownership of that spec becoming broader than just Adobe—to some extent it is bigger than Adobe."
Rosenbaum says that letting other industries bring their needs to the table—and contribute to the standard—will help sculpt a PDF spec built for the long run. The life of a software application typically is measured in years or perhaps a decade, but governments and corporations are making plans encompassing multiple decades for their electronic documentation. Adobe hopes ISO approval will give PDF that kind of staying power.
"We've heard loud and clear from customers, competitors and partners that they believe there's a lot of new innovation that can go into PDF," she says. "We may be a big software company, but we're not experts in everything. Print publishing, we kind of get that, but there are needs of other constituents where we are definitely not the experts, and we probably wouldn't do a very good job adding to PDF to meet their needs. We'd rather have them—or experts in those fields—add to PDF to meet those needs. The most equitable way to do that is to go through a standards body."
Document Management 
