TOOL OF THE MONTH

ISO Approves PDF as an International Standard
by Elizabeth Montalbano

The International Organization for Standardization
has approved Adobe Systems' widely used PDF
(Portable Document Format) as an international
standard, and is now in charge of any changes made
to the specification.

The format is open and accessible to anyone as ISO
32000-1, the standards body said Wednesday. The
standard is based Adobe's version 1.7 of PDF.

PDF, the file format for Adobe's Acrobat software,
has long been used as a standard way for people to
exchange and view business documents. However,
Adobe kept a proprietary hold on the format until it
finally succumbed to industry pressure and
submitted it for standardization in February 2007.

Adobe's move reflected an industrywide trend to
standardize broadly adopted file formats to increase
interoperability between different applications
people use to create business documents.