ISO Says OK to PDF

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced that it has approved Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) as an international standard for electronic documents."By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness," said Adobe chief technology officer Kevin Lynch.

The ISO's decision also means the responsibility for publishing the current specs and for updating and developing future versions will fall to the standards body. "As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular format is easily available to all interested stakeholders," ISO secretary-general Alan Bryden said. "The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology."

The new PDF standard's official name is "ISO 32000-1, Document management -- Portable document format -- Part 1: PDF 1.7."InformationWeek