Portable Document Format Has a New Standard
A new ISO standard has been defined for PDF (Portable Document Format) files. The new standard will be referenced as ISO International Standard - ISO 32000-1, July 2008.
This is important news for document management within large organisations as PDF is now a very common form of information exchange, widely used by businesses and large organisations.
It is estimated there are many billions of PDF documents in existence today. The PDF format allows users to exchange and view the documents easily and reliably, independent of the environments in which they are created, viewed and printed, while preserving their content and visual appearance.
Previous to this Adobe Systems Incorporated (who developed the format) were in charge of publishing the specifications for the PDF file format, but this is now handed over to ISO.
“By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness",
says Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer at Adobe."As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years.”
ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden states that
“As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular format is easily available to all interested stakeholders.
The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology that cuts across systems and is designed for long term survival.”
The PDF format enables:
- preservation of document appearance independent of operating system or browser
- merging of content from different applications
- collaborative editing of documents
- digital signatures for authenticity
- security and permissions to preserve control over content
- accessibility of content to those with disabilities
- extraction and reuse of content for use with other file formats, and
- integrating data with business systems using PDF forms.
DCS offer specialist PDF conversion services including conversion into all varieties of PDF and optional services to optimise them for web distribution.
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