Adobe opens up PDF to make it an industry standard

Subsets of the PDF format have already been standardized, including one for archiving documents. But Adobe customers, particularly governments, have told Adobe that making PDF an ISO-approved standard would raise their level of confidence that the format would be around in the long term, said Kevin Lynch, Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect.

"We've already been taking feedback and updating the specification over time. Now we'll be doing it in a more formal way through a standards body," he said.

Adobe will give the specification that forms the basis for its PDF Reader and Acrobat products to the industry group Enterprise Content Management Association (formerly the Association for Information and Image Management and still referred to as AIIM).