Get ready to celebrate because the PDF industry has reached a major milestone.
If you haven’t heard the news yet, on July 2nd, 2008, after more than 10 years on the market as a de facto standard, the Portable Document Format (PDF) was approved for ISO certification as an international standard.
PDF standardization, as everyone knows, has been long overdue. In 15 years, 9 generations of technology have come and gone (we’re at Acrobat 9 now!). The fact that the PDF has made it through the long years and has improved steadily from version to version is a testament to its capabilities and uses as a format.
Glancing Back To A Present Moment
Of course, as a standard as it will mean the significant changes PDF critics and experts have been talking about for over a year now. I remember in a February 2007 posting, I threw up a few questions that were aimed at the moment when PDF 1.7 got its certification:
“Yet, aside from the competition with the ISO approval for OOXML, Adobe is also seeing competition with itself. When the PDF 1.7 spec gets its ISO certification, changes will have to be made in software already being used for PDF files. How will pre-ISO PDF files be handled as opposed to post-ISO PDF files? This also means changes for third party vendors-- their products, their market and their projects. There’ll be a ripple to accommodate the adjustments, but just how big?”
I guess we can start fully answering those questions now . . . .
Are you looking forward to working with PDF files? Hope so. Because there’s no time like the present to be a PDF user.
Cheers!
