Adobe Systems intends to submit its ubiquitous PDF format to the International Organisation for Standardisation as part of its ongoing format war with Microsoft and Vista.
The announcement comes the day before Microsoft's competing format XPS (XML Paper Specification) ships with the new Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software suite. Formally known as Metro, XPS has been described as a "PDF killer" intended to break PDF's decade-long role as the de facto standard for printable documents.
Adobe plans to release the full Portable Document Format 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardisation. The software giant published the PDF specification back in the 1993 and several subsets of the format have already become ISO standards. PDF for Archive (PDF/A) and PDF for Exchange (PDF/X) are ISO standards, and PDF for Engineering (PDF/E) and PDF for Universal Access (PDF/UA) are proposed standards. Additionally, PDF for Healthcare (PDF/H) is an AIIM proposed Best Practice Guide.
The process of submitting the full PDF format is expected to take up to three years, but the announcement is designed to reassure large corporate and government PDF users of Adobe's long term intentions for the format and stave off defections to Microsoft's XPS.
"Today's announcement is the next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal, de jure standard," said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe.
"By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardisation, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness. 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."
The "rich PDF ecosystem" is under threat from Microsoft, which is working hard to tighten its stranglehold on various document formats. Microsoft has fast-tracked the process of making its Open XML an ISO standard, which is designed to work with Office 2007. Open XML is intended to combat the open source community's Open Document Format - which was accepted as an ISO standard last year. The Open Document Format is used by the open source OpenOffice office suite - which some consider a threat to Microsoft's efforts to convince organisations to upgrade to Office 2007.
Such moves comes amidst a global backlash against de facto standards, such as Microsoft's Office formats, by governments and large corporations which fear a reliance on one vendor and format. While Microsoft describes Open XML as open source, it's not licensed in a fashion that proponents of open source licensing would recognise as being open. Rather than granting users open source-like rights to the format, the license consists of a promise by Microsoft not to sue those who use the format. It also leaves the standard open to drop in proprietary code.
The release of Vista also marks Microsoft's efforts to push its proprietary HD Photo format as a replacement to the ubiquitous JPEG image format. Texas-based Forgent Networks last year failed in a bid to claim ownership of a specific algorithm with the JPEG format, losing lawsuits against 31 major hardware and software vendors including Microsoft.
Microsoft's struggle to gain acceptance for HD Photo has been boosted by support from Adobe, which has added the format to its flagship Photoshop photo editing application.{moscomment}
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