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PDF Is Now ISO 32000
It is official. As PDF Architect Jim King blogged today, Adobe has received word that the ballot for approval of PDF 1.7 to become the ISO 32000 Standard (DIS) has passed by a vote of 13 positive to 1 negative. A two-thirds majority is required to pass so it was a large margin of victory (93%). The vote breaks down as follows: Countries voting positive with no comments (9): Australia, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine. Countries voting positive with comments (4): UK (13 comments), USA (125), Germany (11), Switzerland (19). Countries voting negative with comments (1): France (37 comments). Countries abstaining (1): Russia.
RTFA. It's almost a subtle jab at how different the PDF standardization process has been from the OOXML standardization attempt. The PDF process has been straightforward, with no "trickery," and the proponents were actually working to improve the standard and resolve technical problems.
Another standard from our friends the ISO. I'm glad the .pdf is now a documented standard, but this doesn't really mean TOO much in the document world. It might convince a few pointy-haired bosses that .pdf is MUCH better than develpoing some internal document handling protocol due to the imposing and convincing sound the standard makes when spoken, but I know that most of the ISO standardization process is in name only.
Let's not get started about process and quality management and the yellow sticky of approval that is ISO-9000.
It's sad that PDF, which seems like a pretty good format to me, has earned such a poor reputation. It has nothing to do with the format, rather, it has everything to do with the shitty software Adobe has put out to read PDFs. Sure, recent versions of Reader have improved loading time, and there are alternative packages available for reading, but the precedent was set around the time Reader 6 or 7 came out, as PDF usage was exploding. I grimmace everytime I see a link to a PDF on my Windows machine or on a Solaris workstation. Both have Reader installed, and it is a truly shitty piece of software: the load time is far too long (even with the latest improvements), it has embedded ads, the interface doesn't match the platform's Look & Feel well... the list goes on. Adobe could do a lot to spur the popularity of PDF by releasing a really high quality reader... but the damage may have already been too great.
I might also add that the entire point behind the ambiguity in OOXML is to lock users into Microsoft Office. I can use any PDF viewer, because it is a well defined standard, but if the only viewer that displayed PDF's 100% correctly was Adobe's, I'd have to use them. Same idea with OOXML. If 90% of the world uses Microsoft's interpretation of the standard, and I try to use something else, everyone else is going to have trouble with my documents. I'll have to use Microsoft Office, or have people be annoyed with my poorly formed documents.
I'm not anti-Microsoft, I'm just disgusted with this issue.
Let me count the ways that PDF succeeds:
If OOXML met these criteria, it would stand a fair chance of becoming an accepted standard, too. But Microsoft does not seem to think that meeting these criteria are in its best interests, presumably because that would mean that people could use OOXML without buying licenses to Microsoft products. Microsoft isn't thinking clearly at this time; it is confusing some of the fantasy aspects of its "vision" with the evolving realities of the market it is trying to sell product to.