Adobe looks to have full PDF spec become ISO standard

Adobe Systems Inc. is taking the first step toward having its entire Portable Document Format specification recognized as a global standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO).

The vendor today announced plans to submit the full PDF 1.7 specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) with the hope that the enterprise content management nonprofit organization will recommend that ISO adopt it as an international standard.

The move was driven in part by a growing proliferation of ISO standards around different subsets of the PDF specification, said Sarah Rosenbaum, director of product management at Adobe. "It was becoming a bit of an alphabet soup dependent on industries or uses of the specification," she said.

Having PDF 1.7 as an ISO standard should make life easier for organizations that need to comply with government-mandated strategies to use the format. "The entire spec will be available as an umbrella standard," Rosenbaum said.