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New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures
An anonymous reader writes "ETSI has published a multi-part standard that will facilitate secure paperless business transactions throughout Europe, in conformance with European legislation. The standard defines a series of profiles for PAdES — Advanced Electronic Signatures for PDF documents — that meet the requirements of the European Directive on a Community framework for electronic signatures (Directive 1999/93/EC)."
Are you claiming to be a better tool?
There are many ways to create PDFs and read PDFs without relying on Adobe. Mac OS X offers wide support for this format, every application that can print can create a PDF file. PDFs can be opened with Preview and many other applications understand it.
LaTeX can create PDF files either directly or with ghostscript, which creates PDFs out of Postcript files.
Many different libraries exist to create a PDF programmatically.
Not all implementations might be feature complete, but it's far from being as proprietary as Office from Microsoft.
I use PDF all the time on linux. I don't use a single adobe product, and I do use a commercial product for annotation. Thats not lock in.
You can download the full PDF spec with a pretty standard agreement. The biggest part of the agreement is that the pdf readers you write with the standard will enforce document "no printing/no copying" settings. You don't need to pay a fee that a lot of other standards require before they give the documentation.
PDF as a format is controlled by adobe, but it is open format in that everyone can implement readers and writers without restriction.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute's search page is at:
http://pda.etsi.org/pda/queryform.asp
Search for "pades" in the title will get you the five parts of the standard (well, Technical Specification).
ETSI TS 102 778-x
And thank goodness it's ETSI doing this, since they publish their standards without charge.
PDF is now an ISO standard so theoretically no longer controlled by Adobe. The latest specification no longer includes the text about PDF readers enforcing document security settings in exchange for the permission to use the "copyrighted data structures".