Adobe PDF Standardization Effort Not So New

While news of Adobe's submission of its Portable Document Format standard to an agency that works with the International Standards Organization (ISO) is being interpreted today as a response to Microsoft's move to standardize its Office Open XML suite of document formats, Adobe's efforts with the AIIM group to entrench PDF extend back to 2002.

And today, the company's Director of Product Management confirmed to BetaNews that the actual PDF standardization process - requests, meetings, submissions, discussions, revisions, etc. - actually began in 1995.

The difficulty in navigating the long road to achieving industry standardization can perhaps best be epitomized by the fact that the group with whom Adobe has been working these last five years, AIIM (formerly the Association for Information and Image Management, originally the National Microfilm Association) now calls itself the Enterprise Content Management Association; whereas another standards body - ECMA, which works with Microsoft - is actually not related, and is just "ECMA" or "Ecma."

Since 2002, Adobe has worked with AIIM to produce standards based on PDF - that is, implementations of the evolving PDF format which represent typical use cases. AIIM has already produced implementation standards for the ISO: PDF/Archive (PDF/A), adopted in 2004, which is one implementation of the PDF format for long-term, high-quantity storage; and PDF/Exchange (PDF/X), which serves the graphic arts community with a basic feature set geared for conversion between proprietary formats.

Adobe's Sarah Rosenbaum reminded BetaNews that PDF/A and PDF/X are adopted today by the ISO, while two other implementations -- PDF/E for engineering applications, and PDF/UA for "universal access" -- are active proposals.

So what exactly happened today, anyway? Adobe announced it would be submitting not an implementation of PDF, but the actual document format itself - the 1.7 edition, recently released for use with the Acrobat 8.0 suite.

One major unresolved question, however, is whether the AIIM process is geared for managing the submission of a format, as opposed to an implementation, before the ISO. The ISO codifies processes and techniques as well as formats, but the submission of a complete format would be different from any kind of work AIIM and Adobe have done together before, judging from a description of the standardization process published last June on Adobe's support Web site.

As Diana Helander, group manager for worldwide standards, stated in a Q&A, typically AIIM members from various industries, come together to discuss use cases that could be addressed by a common implementation.

"The reasons for [their] involvement vary across the board," Helander stated, "but overall the goal is to establish some level of interoperability. A like-minded group of people typically first gets together informally to discuss the need for putting together a standard because formal standards development takes a while -- typically a three- to five-year process -- so you don't enter into it lightly."

After the initial meeting, Helander explained, the AIIM develops a timeframe that members try to follow for developing the standard implementation, and petitioning the ISO for review, recommendation, and hopefully final approval.

But since 1993, PDF itself has been a more rapidly evolving format than a standards format timetable can keep up with - now on its eighth public version in a fourteen-year history. In prior years, the fact that PDF is, to some degree, nebulous has been the excuse for why it has not been submitted to the ISO or another organization in the past: you can't codify, or set in stone, something designed to change as user needs change.

So why the change of mind? What really kept Adobe from submitting PDF to a standards organization in the past, or did Adobe actually start this process long, long ago?

"PDF has evolved rapidly to include support for Web technologies, rich media and XML," Adobe's Sarah Rosenbaum responded to BetaNews, "and Adobe has been committed to maintaining its backwards compatibility with the first versions of Acrobat and the free Adobe Reader. At the same time, because Adobe made the specification public and Adobe Reader freely available, PDF became ubiquitous. A community of developers arose who build PDF creation, viewing, and manipulation tools to meet a variety of business needs. At this point in the development of PDF it makes sense to extend its openness by working through a formal standards process.

"To date," she continued, "Adobe has focused external standards efforts on specific industries and functions, and published the PDF specification for broader use. With the recent release of the 1.7 specification, it now makes sense to let the full specification serve as a unifying umbrella."

For PDF 1.7 to become a formal standard, however, something has to change: Either the ISO needs to be ready to adopt a more nebulous and evolving specification than it appears to have been willing to accept from Adobe in the past, or Adobe needs to declare the PDF format largely complete and "in the bag." As of now, it's hard to tell which will happen first.

Nonetheless, the history of Adobe’s long, though perhaps not troubled, running dialog with one standards body suggests the company did not, as some reports today suggested, respond in a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft’s move using whatever standards body was available, or discover a sound-alike organization to ECMA in just the last few weeks in a maneuver to confuse users.