Adobe offers Pdf as open standard

Adobe is submitting the full specification of its portable document format (Pdf) to the International Standards Organisation (ISO) for formal recognition as an open standard.

The move comes the day before the consumer release, simultaneous with Vista, of Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite, which includes a rival technology called XPS.

It means Microsoft now faces a standards battle on two fronts. The new Open XML document formats used in Office 2007 have also been submitted to ISO for approval as a standard but have met opposition from proponents of the rival Open Document Format (ODF), which has already been approved.

Several government organisations, particularly in Europe, have supported the need for open standards for document exchange between different platforms. Both Pdf and Microsoft's existing binary file formats are de facto standards, in that most people use them.

But the advent of Open XML and ODF is likely to bring the issue to the fore because organisations face having to cope with new formats whether they want to or not.

Adobe announced today that it is sending the Pdf 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, as a preliminary to ISO submission. Specialist versions of the Pdf spec are already ISO standards.

Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, said the submission of the full spec reinforced Adobe's "commitment to openness".

He added: "As governments and organisations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the Pdf specification by an external and participatory organisation will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich Pdf ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years.”

Adobe says an AIIM committee will draw up a draft submission to an ISO working group for development and approval as a standard.