
PDF becomes ISO standard - markbao
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1141
======
jws
Remember to snag a copy of
[http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.p...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf)
for future reference after the standard vanishes behind ISO's pay policies.

~~~
tokipin
i'm a noob about these things. could you explain what you mean?

~~~
etal
ISO (and FDA, etc.) standards tend to not be freely available online. Instead,
you pay a few hundred bucks for a copy of the standard, which may be printed,
electronic, or both. A sort of cottage industry even sprung up around this --
since the standard itself is copyrighted material, I think other companies are
licensing it to resell.

Before the internet, and when the only users of standards were companies too
large to care about a few hundred dollars, this made some sense. It's fairly
annoying now, but existing businesses depend on this policy, thus they lobby,
yadda yadda...

~~~
tokipin
thanks. i remember trying to get a hold of the PCI standard a few years ago.
there went my little hardware interface project ;_;

------
kajecounterhack
Question: What does this mean for Adobe? Were they earning money by not
relinquishing control, or what?

~~~
ROFISH
Adobe's been opening the PDF for awhile. Basic specs have been free for all
for awhile. Considering the fact that PDF printing is available as a "value-
added" feature in both Office and OS X, this is pretty much the next big step
for them.

~~~
Hexstream
If they don't open up, experience says a new open standard will eat their
lunch. Might as well push ahead of the wave (or whatever the proper idiom is).

~~~
etal
Or a pseudo-open one -- Microsoft's XPS format has had some push and was
submitted to ECMA not too long ago.

------
redorb
am i the only one who never got into PDF because it was a easily seen closed
system of being able to read it for free, but to create it cost money? .... I
always wished they would just disappear now its seems they are here to stay ;(

~~~
HansF
If you use the pdf creator software from adobe that may be the case, but that
includes DTP software. I've been using pdfcreator (
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/> ) for years now. Works like
adobe's distiller and does the job great.

------
omnipath
I'll be more impressed if the pdf format was actually easily editable.
<http://rants.scribus.net/2006/12/10/pdf-surgery/>

------
mojuba
... _undeniably one of the most commonly_ _misused_ _formats_...

~~~
dcurtis
PDF is the base of Mac OS X's UI. Is that a misuse?

~~~
jws
Quartz's model is compatible, there is even a 1:1 mapping of many PDF concepts
to quartz, but it isn't really PDF.

There is a PDF renderer in a higher layer which makes PDF convenient for
content, and I there is a "to PDF" capture mechanism to reuse drawing code for
PDF generation.

I think Quartz did a look around to see what graphic models were surviving the
test of time and chose one rather than inventing their own. Rumor was they
wanted to use Display Postscript, but Adobe wanted royalties so they made an
API mapped to the concepts of PDF instead.

~~~
dcurtis
Interesting. Apple specifically says it's "built on PDF"; in fact, Steve Jobs
said so at Macworld San Francisco 2001.

~~~
nickb
Not only that but NeXT computer's display model was based on PostScript. Apple
moved on to PDF once Adobe released the specs.

------
newt0311
Yay.

