AIIM-hosted committee sets sights on fast-track adoption of standard for engineering and CAD documents.Professionals working in engineering and CAD across industries—from architecture and construction to manufacturing—could have an international PDF standard in the next couple of years, if a committee developing the PDF/E standard can iron out issues such as implementing 3D, digital signatures and rights management.
This week represents a milestone for PDF/E, as the U.S. wing of the PDF/E Working Group submits the current draft to the ISO for review by a joint international working group.
The group, jointly formed by enterprise content management association AIIM and printing industry association NPES, includes representatives from software companies, as well as engineering and document management professionals.
Like the PDF/X standard for prepress and PDF/A for electronic archiving, PDF/E covers a subset of the overall PDF spec. The committee discusses best practices in the field among its members and customers of its constituent vendors—including Adobe, Agile, Bentley Systems, Hewlett Packard, Océ, Intel, PTC, Layton Graphics, Dell, UGS PLM Solutions, among others—and assembles a draft standard.
Vendor aims to make PDF the medium for secure document transfer. Click here to read more.
In January, the working group readied its PDF/E draft as a "new working item," which it will formally submit this week to ISO. That's basically an order form for a new ISO standard, as Diana Helander, Adobe's business development manager for worldwide standards, puts it.
Helander, a member of the PDF/E committee, says that the group worked quickly, getting a draft ready for ISO in 10 months.
"It's pretty exciting that we've actually finalized the specification, because we did it in under a year," Helander says. "Our intention is to fast-track the standard, so our hope is that with all of the balloting times…we would have a final, ratified standard by, let's say, the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007.
That could happen if PDF/E follows the same track of PDF/A, Helander adds. The ISO will vote on PDF/A ratification in late May, after several years in the development-and-approval pipeline. Barring issues raised by ISO member countries, PDF/A will be recognized as a standard at that point; if issues come up, the PDF/E working group's counterpart among the archivist community will create a revised draft of PDF/A for ratification.
What does ISO ratification of PDF/E get the engineer end-users? A starting point upon which software developers can build new applications, and retrofit PDF/E into existing ones, says Betsy Fanning, AIIM standards program director.
The goal is that the complex, large-format drawings and renderings these professionals pass among each other—and their clients—will display properly, show multimedia content in a consistent fashion, handle form fields, and maintain the document-level security they require in a competitive field.
"It will allow for easier transmission of engineering documents among parties," Fanning says. "It will promote the sharing of information in a much easier format than they've been able to do so far."
Adobe might be the sole proprietor of Acrobat and the publisher of the PDF spec, but at the PDF/E table, it's a big fish in a big pond sitting beside the likes of Intel and Bentley Systems, together hammering out a public-domain standard.
"Adobe is just one voice among many, and they do not have any sense of dominance on the committee—we worked very hard to make sure that they didn't," Fanning says.
Not only must the committee members agree among themselves how to implement the standard, but they in turn must accommodate the different representatives of each ISO member country. Fanning says that PDF/E's special challenges in this regard include finding the best royalty-free ways to write 3D rendering and digital signatures into the standard.
"[That is] the key to standards and making sure it's usable—and used heavily," Fanning says, adding that she hopes at least some of the software companies represented on the committee would have applications that work with PDF/E files ready for release at the time ISO approves the standard and AIIM/NPS publishes the final spec.
Document Management 
