Opinion: Gates joins the ever-growing PDF developer ecosystem with native export to PDF in the next version of Microsoft Office.Like the native Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats, PDF is not an open standard. Yet all of these formats are de facto standards in their own fields, be it word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and electronic documentation. Most everyone knows and uses them.
But PDF has an added bonus: You don't need the native application (Acrobat) to view the files, just Adobe Reader, which is free.
To some people, PDF's an odd bird. It's a privately owned standard but the specification is publicly available.
Ultimately, Adobe controls the file specification's destiny: What's in the standard, where it's headed in the next version, and when the next version will hit public release. Adobe listens closely to users when building capabilities into the document format, but they hold ultimate veto power.
That said, anyone can lay hands on the PDF specification. People knowledgeable enough to read the spec can see what's under the PDF hood and write code that creates, edits and manages PDFs.
Click here to read what Adobe and the analysts are saying about Microsoft's PDF move.
But PDF is not an open standard, which is a standard propagated by industry committees that meet frequently—or infrequently as the case may be—to wrangle over what should be in it. And then wrangle over how to implement what they've decided to put into it.
Some PDF observers express frustration with Adobe for controlling the spec. They argue that the format's development should be in the hands of the public, especially since government agencies increasingly legislate PDF as the only electronic document format they will accept. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has gone as far as to de-list Office files but retain PDF (along with OpenDocument) as an approved format in its new electronic document policy. Why? I'm simplifying things here, but basically, because Adobe Reader is free.
No one can argue that Adobe's controlling hand has sped PDF's evolution to the point where, today, a PDF file can be a sophisticated, rights-managed form, a densely complex print production file, or a mind-blowing multimedia experience that no paper publication can match.
Is Microsoft scared about OpenDocument? Click here to read more.
Yet because the PDF standard is publicly available, people are free to write their own PDF widgets. This is part of the reason PDF has spread like wildfire throughout government and enterprise.
For example, if I were working on the documentation for a big government agency—let's call it the Department of Homeland Bureaucracy—and Acrobat (or a competing PDF creator that my bureaucrats use) couldn't add a little proprietary something I needed present in all our PDFs, then I could write a custom application to do it. Let's call it Don's PDF Widget.
I could share Don's PDF Widget with my pals at other agencies in the same boat, and anyone could download it if I threw it up on the department's Web site. If it turned out to be useful to a lot of people, I'd be invited to speak at conferences and would blow the crowd away with my genius.
Back in real life, Thom Parker, founder of WindJack Solutions, makes interesting PDF widgets. He actually does speak at PDF conferences and wows the crowd.
He welcomes Bill Gates to the PDF developer clique, now that Microsoft has announced its intentions to build "Save as PDF" as a feature into the next version of Office, code-named "12" and due out next year.
Microsoft isn't the only developer to write PDF support into its applications—Parker says he's seen a common plotline repeated more and more frequently of late: "If you go back and look at the developer threads at the Adobe forum and the PlanetPDF forum, over time, you can see people come in and say 'I want to do this,' and it's real detailed, in-depth kind of stuff with the PDF spec," says Parker.
Is Microsoft gunning for Abobe? Click here to read more.
He notes that one back-room developer—this probably wasn't Bill Gates—caught flack on a forum when forced to admit he was writing code for his PDF app on a notepad utility. "Lo and behold, a year later, a new product shows up on the market and you can go back and look at the questions [on the forums] and say 'Oh, these people wrote [the] PDF maker.'
"There's been a lot of interest over the last two years of people wanting to build PDF capability into their applications and they've just done it—and it's out there."
Next Page: PDF 1.4 is a good target for Microsoft.
For the uninitiated—without delving into a War-and-Peace–length dissertation on the history of the file specification—each PDF spec so far has been named "one-point-something." The spec gets updated with each version of Acrobat. The way to remember what's what is this simple mnemonic device: The digits add up to the corresponding version of Acrobat—i.e. Acrobat 7 uses PDF spec 1.6, Acrobat 6 uses 1.5, and so on.
Which brings us to Microsoft's announcement. As of this writing, the next version of Office, code-named "Office 12," will feature native export of PDF 1.4, or the version last updated at Acrobat 5's release. Let's call it Bill's PDF Widget.
Pundits ponder Microsoft's move. Click here to read more.
Why won't Microsoft support a more recent spec? Windjack's Parker says that supporting 1.4 is actually a very sensible technological decision on Microsoft's part. The 1.6 spec is quite complex with many bells and whistles, but 1.4 has everything to display and print the documents most Office users will make.
"The PDF spec is huge," Parker says. "It makes an awesome amount of sense [for Microsoft to support PDF 1.4]. … Where Acrobat really became useful and has some kick-butt stuff for interactive and Web use, that was Acrobat 5. It was a huge bump in usability for PDF. Printers are only really interested in Acrobat 4 [files], but 5 is kind of the minimum for interactive forms and Web use."
On one hand, some analysts might surmise that Microsoft's building native PDF support into Office could propel PDF to new heights of adoption and standardization. That might be right. Especially if it eventually drains the life out of Microsoft's fledgling Metro and InfoPath technologies, which could compete with PDF down the road, theoretically.
On the other hand, for years people have had access to commercially supported PDF creators from Adobe, ScanSoft, ARTS PDF, activePDF, Global Graphics and a host of other companies—and scores more freeware PDF creators on the Web just waiting to be downloaded. Many of them show up as print drivers and export to PDF from many Windows applications, which is how the feature in the upcoming Office appears to work.
Will Bill's PDF Widget make PDF more pervasive in the enterprise? Probably. But not as much as one might think, Parker guesses, because so many Office users who want to make PDFs already are doing it.
"Mac has had PDF built in since OS X," Parker says. "The fact of the matter is, anybody who's motivated to make PDFs could buy [a cheap Windows Acrobat alternative] or they could download a free something. But that would take a conscious decision to go do that, as opposed to 'Oh, look, it's there!' and just press a button. So I bet it does increase PDF usage, but I bet it's not exponential."
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