Adobe is contributing the PDF 1.7 specification, and AIIM has agreed to take responsibility for standardizing future development. While Adobe will be a member of the working group that will assume stewardship, it is effectively getting out of the file format business. And responsibility for maintaining and deciding on new features and functionality for PDF will now reside with AIIM.
It’s being given to a group that was previously known as the Association for Information and Image Management, and before that, the National Microfilm Association.
Adobe billed it as a move to satisfy the needs of customers, especially the public sector, to require open standards-based technologies as part of future procurements. It’s not the first time that aspects of PDF have been submitted to standards bodies, but in the past, it was for extensions that weren’t developed by Adobe alone.
They included PDF/X (where the X standards for Exchange), by standardizing rendition of colors for print ads, which became ANSI and ISO standards in 1999 and 2000, respectively. And there was PDF/A (for Archive), which was handled by an AIIM working group and ratified by ISO in 2005. Currently, PDF/E (for engineering document exchange) and PDF/UA (for universal access, to satisfy mandates such as US section 508 accessibility requirements) are currently in t he AIIM working group pipeline.
On this go-round, Adobe decided to formalize the marriage with AIIM for the core spec.
But this all comes on the heels of Microsoft’s of its Open XML file format from Office 12 to ECMA and ISO. And Microsoft’s move in turn was prompted by the success of ODF (Open Document Format) in driving a wedge with public agencies that were seeking open standards-based alternatives to the proprietary Microsoft .DOC file format.
According to a blog from Brian Jones, a program manager for Microsoft Office, Open XML is now officially on a fast track approval process at ISO, which he estimates will take about six months.
Of course, Adobe’s move to place PDF formerly into the standards domain has a funny ring given press accounts last year that it wouldn’t allow Microsoft to add a free-of-charge save as PDF option in Office 12. That allegation was denied by Sarah Rosenbaum, director of product management of Adobe, who claimed that Microsoft’s decision to drop the PDF file conversion feature was its own, and not prompted by Adobe.
As to the status of Adobe’s move to donate the PDF file format to AIIM, the actual handover will depend on AIIM’s internal processes.
