Adobe Pushes for PDF Standardization

By NewsFactor Network | January 30, 2007

In a competitive move against Microsoft’s emerging XPS format, Adobe on Monday released its Portable Document Format 1.7 specification to a standards group for official recognition.

While PDF is already the unofficial standard for electronic documents, Adobe hopes to set the format in stone and lock out Microsoft by releasing the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) for publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Much like PDF, Microsoft’s XPS, or XML Paper Specification, allows users to distribute and print documents without installing the actual application that created them. Some analysts view Microsoft’s decision to remove the “Save As PDF” feature from its new Office productivity suite and replace it with XPS as a clear indication that the software giant intends to battle Adobe in this arena.

Reinforcing Its Stance

Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe, threw down the gauntlet in the ISO arena, calling the company’s decision to seek approval the next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal, de jure standard.

“By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness,” Lynch said in a statement, arguing that standardization will drive continued innovation and expand the PDF ecosystem that has developed over the past 15 years.

Adobe published the complete PDF specification in 1993, giving it a leg up on Microsoft’s nascent XPS format and offering business users more robust capabilities, according to Directions on Microsoft analyst Greg DeMichillie. XPS, he added, is immature compared to PDF.

“Consumers will find the functions of PDF and XPS similar; you open an electronic file and it looks just like it would on paper,” he noted. “But from a business perspective, you can do much more with PDF on several levels.”

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