Gear

PDF Approved As ISO Standard. XPS Corpse Found In Dumpster

PDF is public. Submitted to ISO, the International Standards Organization, for inclusion, it’s received approval and been redubbed ISO 320000. In the voting, Russia abstained and France voted against inclusion. The other 13 members of the consortium said "Aye." Ratification will come after a commenting session beginning January 21, and a final two-month drafting period […]

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PDF is public.

Submitted to ISO, the International Standards Organization, for inclusion, it's received approval and been redubbed ISO 320000. In the voting, Russia abstained and France voted against inclusion. The other 13 members of the consortium said "Aye."

Ratification will come after a commenting session beginning January 21, and a final two-month drafting period and vote. It's not clear why France hates PDF.

What does it all mean? ISO takes control of the format's spec, but it doesn't matter an awful lot because it's already freely usable. The ISO won't go development crazy — standardization encourages compliance and uniformity and dampens radical change. The real beef here is Adobe throttling Microsoft's PDF clone format, XPS, in the crib.