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.

ISO?

[tepples (727027)]

So where can I download an ISO of PDF tools?

Re:ISO?

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

While I realize this is supposed to be an amusing turn of phrase, there are actually quite a few tools out there. A few that I like are:

PDFBox [pdfbox.org] - OSS Library for modifying PDFs on the fly.
FOP [apache.org] - Use XSL-FO to design printable page layouts in XML, then use FOP to transform them to PDF documents.
Foxit Tools [foxitsoftware.com] - Alternative to the overpriced Adobe products.
OpenOffice [openoffice.org] - The built-in support for PDFs is absolutely wonderful. I rarely give out DOC files anymore.
FPDF [fpdf.org] - PHP PDF generation tools.
iText [lowagie.com] - A great library for your own custom PDF generation.

Those are just a few. The PDF format itself is actually not too bad. (When Adobe isn't breaking it with needless revisions, that is.) It's biggest strength is that the psuedo-text nature of the format allows one to diagnose the internals of a file pretty easily. Its greatest weakness is that things like text fields are needlessly convoluted. At the end of the day, though, it's a pretty good format.

Re:ISO?

[ortholattice (175065)]

And last but hopefully not least, pdflatex and pdftex [tug.org]. You simply use "pdflatex" in place of the "latex" command to generate pdf output instead of dvi output, with much better quality than latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf (which unfortunately people who don't know better still use).

Re:ISO?

[eggnoglatte (1047660)]

I like pdflatex for when I am still writing on a document. For the final version, though, I find that ps2pdf gives me better control over image resizing, compression, and, most importantly, font embedding.

Re:ISO?

[Yahma (1004476)]

Don't forget:
PDFLib [pdflib.com] - The standard (and powerful) PDF Library for PHP5
PDFLib Lite [pdflib.com] - The OpenSource version of the above
FPDI [setasign.de] - Imports existing PDF documents into FPDF

PDFLib Lite is a great tool for dynamically creating PDF documents on the FLY with PHP. Or, FPDF & FPDI if you don't mind a slight performance hit.

Re:ISO?

[Dana P'Simer (530866)]

On Mac OS every print dialog has an option to print to PDF instead of the printer. Very Handy!

Re:ISO?

[benow (671946)]

You could do a pdf to jpg [pdfbox.org] for each page, then a resize to thumbnail. You'd want to cache the thumbnails, but if your pdfs aren't changing much, there's not too much overhead.

Re:ISO?

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

Yes and no. Thumbnails are not too difficult to support, and can be managed by libraries like PDFBox and iText. The problem is that thumbnails are actually small drawings embedded in the PDF file. Unless you have a PDF renderer handy, they can often be a bit hard to create. Your best bet is to narrow down your choices to your language/platform of choice (e.g. Java, .NET, PHP, whatever), find one of the options that allows you to insert thumbnails, then render the thumbnail in the source program before inserting it into the PDF file. If your program is already graphical, then you shouldn't have too much trouble. If you are creating the PDF more dynamically, then you'll need to get creative. :)

France...

[nebaz (453974)]

We should rename the application "Freedom Bat Reader", to protest their no vote.

Re:France...

[644bd346996 (1012333)]

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.

The Russians

[by Anonymous Coward]

The Russians are waiting for PDF to vote for THEM...

Re:France...

[GreatDrok (684119)]

"OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards."

Because PDF works and can be implemented?

There are many implementations of PDF including commercial and open source ones. They can interoperate with high fidelity. OOXML isn't even implemented according to the specs in MS Office 2007 and there are no other reliable implementations.

Re:PDF works

[tonyr60 (32153)]

PDF was never intended to be edited, once published. The objective of the format it that it can be rendered as the author intended, not edited.

Re:France...

[3247 (161794)]

PDF can be implemented right up until Adobe threatens to sue you if you implement it. Although they're perfectly fine with you offering it as a free download instead.

That was antitrust law.

If Microsoft bundles software with its products and/or integrates new features, other companies like Adobe, Netscape or Realmedia often fear that they will sell fewer of their products. Unfortunately, this means that Microsoft products often can't have features other operating systems or office packages have (PDF export, a decent web browser, ...).

Claus

Re:France...

[Ajehals (947354)]

Presumably the standard submitted was sufficient that any person wishing to do so could use it to create a standards compliant PDF viewer/writer without hitting any major technical or partially documented issues or ambiguous 'IP' concerns. The OOXML standard didn't fail because its a Microsoft format, or because it's proprietary, it failed because (reportedly) the standard document contained ambiguous elements and was insufficient in itself for a third party to fully implement the standard in their own applications.

Of course the various other shenanigans (such as alleged bribery attempts and quasi ballet stuffing) that plagued the OOXML submission probably haven't helped either.

Re:France...

[by Anonymous Coward]

OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?

Go look at the specs for OOXML. They're an embarrassment to the computer science community. You'd think there was no such thing as formal requirements. PDF is very well defined, which makes it possible for third parties to use it.
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.

Re:France...

[mysticgoat (582871)]

OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?

Let me count the ways that PDF succeeds:

1. Over two dozen pdf readers and editors available
2. Full support on numerous different platforms
3. Full support from multiple vendors
4. Complete documentation
5. Reasonably concise documentation
6. Clear documentation
7. Free of proprietary constraints
8. And probably a number of other reasons, but this short list should suffice.

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.

Re:France...

[daem0n1x (748565)]

We already have an ISO standard for office documents. It's called ODF. Sorry, Microsoft you showed up too late for this fight, like you did a few times in the past. We don't need another office document standard, please start supporting ODF or else just fuck off.

Comments?

[Khaed (544779)]

I don't suppose there's a link anywhere to read the comments, especially those of the lone dissenting country? I'm curious as to their reasoning.

Re:Comments?

[by Anonymous Coward]

They probably complained that the 'F' was at the end of the acronym instead of at the front.

Re:Comments?

[harrkev (623093)]

Ok. Here is an excerpt from the French reasoning:

How you English say, I one more time-a unclog my nose in your direction, sons of a window-dresser! So, you think you could out-clever us French folk with your silly acrobat-creating about programming behavior! I wave my private parts at your aunties, you heaving lot of second-hand electric donkey bottom biters.

Re:Comments?

[l810c (551591)]

Comments

Hello, nice site :)

Posted by: Brin | December 4, 2007 01:26 PM

I think Brin left a really nice comment. How he/she made it from MySpace to an article about ISO 32000 Standards is a bit confusing.

In case we forget.

[Protonk (599901)]

Another standard from our friends the ISO [wikipedia.org]. 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.

Adobe

[clarkkent09 (1104833)]

Great, now just make a reader that doesn't slow my system down to a crawl while opening a 100K document.

Re:Adobe

[PenGun (794213)]

Xpdf opens a 114M file in under 2 secs and a 25M one is pretty well instantaneous. Some kind of windose problem no doubt.

Re:Adobe

[forkazoo (138186)]

Great, now just make a reader that doesn't slow my system down to a crawl while opening a 100K document.

The whole point of standardization is that it doesn't matter what Adobe does. Anybody can impliment the standard without too much trouble. Though, in practice, it was a DeFacto standard anyway, and there is already a ton of software that supports PDF. I haven't used Adobe's PDF reader in years.

xpdf, kpdf, Preview.app, Foxit Reader, etc. all work and between them probably support damn near any platform you would want to use. I use Foxit on my Windows machines, and I find it to be very convenient software which is fast, light, and mostly stays out of my way.

That is pretty sensitive....

[Tibor the Hun (143056)]

I dunno much, but ISO 32000 ought to be able to record photos in the very darkest of dark places.
It's too bad they'll be saved as PDFs, I prefer to shoot RAW.

Re:That is pretty sensitive....

[hamisht (197412)]

You mean we could finally get a picture of a grue?

Re:That is pretty sensitive....

[7Prime (871679)]

Actually, he's making a joke about high-speed film (ISO in photography refers to the light-sensitivity of film, as standardized by the ISO council). Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!

Re:That is pretty sensitive....

[RedBear (207369)]

Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!

It's not insane, it's just one "f-stop" more sensitive to light than ISO 16000, which is one f-stop more sensitive than ISO 8000. We've already had ISO 6400 film for decades, and right now on the market there are a couple of cameras (like the latest flagship digital SLR from Nikon) with ISO 26500. Yes, that's twenty-six thousand, five hundred. Don't ask me how or why they did it, but they did. Nothing particularly crazy about it, in fact it's a great thing for those who need to use high shutter speeds in low light and/or can't afford ultra-expensive large aperture lenses.

Within ten years we no doubt will be seeing some digital cameras with ISO 32000 or higher sensitivities. Now if they'd just do something about the extremely limited dynamic range...

Abstaining WITH Comments

[CranberryKing (776846)]

Russia:

"After long internal deliberation, we have arrived at an official position. We don't give a shit."

PDF Tainted by Shitty Adobe Reader

[ComputerPhreak (1057874)]

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.

Re:PDF Tainted by Shitty Adobe Reader

[Arcturax (454188)]

Then get Foxit instead.

Re:PDF Tainted by Shitty Adobe Reader

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm still confused how they manage to make a viewer/reader that lags every single generation, on any hardware. What are they testing it on? Supercomputers?

Re:PDF Tainted by Shitty Adobe Reader

[lahvak (69490)]

They do not offer the same features, its just that most people don't particularly care about the features that are in Adobe Reader and not in Foxit Reader.

Bad Number

[shemnon (77367)]

Number could have been better. Should have been ISO 32768. And the OSS implementations could have been called 32Kib. So close, yet so far.

Re:PDF is nice, but Acrobat ain't

[0100010001010011 (652467)]

Apple relies on Quartz and other built CoreImages to do their PDF rendering. So it works very well under OSX. They'd have to port everything to Windows first. Then you'd end up with a 90 MB "Preview.exe".

See also iTunes and Quicktime in Windows.

Re:PDF is nice, but Acrobat ain't

[f1055man (951955)]

NOOOOO!!! please not another upgrade. It nags me three weeks before an upgrade. NO, I DONT WANT TO FUCKING UPGRADE!!! And three weeks after an upgrade. I ALREADY FUCKING UPGRADED IT!!! Then it resets all my file extension defaults and starts opening everything in Acrobat Reader 8 even though I've told it a million times to open with Acrobat Pro 5. Fucking piece of shit must die.

Note to Acrobat developers, if anyone asks what you do, lie. It could be me. I will fucking kill you and then skull fuck you. I will kill your fucking family and skull fuck them. I will kill your fucking pets and skull fuck them. I will burn your fucking house down and find a way to skull fuck that too. And no jury will convict, they'll wish they had gotten to you first.

Sorry. The first hundred pages of my shit list are devoted solely to Acrobat. Deep breaths, deep breaths

Re:PDF is nice, but Acrobat ain't

[AndrewNeo (979708)]

If a buffer were the only thing standing between Real and certain doom, Real would never die.

Re:PDF is nice, but Acrobat ain't

[7Prime (871679)]

Mac OS Preview isn't a PDF reader... Mac OS X is! Preview is, like, about 20 lines of code, considering that the entire PDF format is built into Core Image... or should I say: Core Image is built completely around PDF.

+5 for Adobe
+1 for Apple
-5 for Microsoft
-10 for Amazon (sorry Kindle, you're fucked)

Re:PDF is nice, but Acrobat ain't

[VGPowerlord (621254)]

Let me adjust those scores for you:
+1 for Apple
0 for Adobe
-3 for Microsoft
-10 for Amazon (sorry Kindle, you're fucked)

Changes I made:
Adobe lost 5 points for threatening to sue Microsoft the last time Microsoft tried implementing PDF in one of their products.
Microsoft gained 2 points for the same thing, but since they're an evil company, I'm not willing to give them more points.

PDFCreator

[Leto-II (1509)]

FoxIt is wonderful, but is there anything free out there that will put a print-to-pdf driver on Windows machines?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Great

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746)]

o, now the "not" so "portable document format" gains further acceptance.

Umm, what isn't portable about PDFs?

I'll grant that it has it's uses but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right.

First, I assume you're talking about Adobe Acrobat, since Adobe is a company, not a product. The whole point of standards is that they do not rely upon any given implementation and anyone and everyone can make their own. Don't like Adobe's free product, get someone else's. I have both free and payware PDF tools from both Adobe and other companies. Do you want better free PDF tools, go ahead and code them, the standard is right there and the licensing to the patents is free. Heck there's even good set of GPL PDF libraries and code from the XPDF project.

I'd also certainly rather have a format that is a lot less file size intensive.

You can make pretty small PDFs, depending upon what you put in them. Or, if you want smaller file sizes and are willing to sacrifice features, use postscript, it's been a standard for a long time.

To all mail users...no, you can't keep all of those emails with pdf's in your inbox without going over your quota.

Mail quotas are so mid 90s. Disk space is cheap and so long as you're not using Exchange (which insists on keeping sometimes hundreds of versions of the same file around, since it is too stupid to just keep one copy for everyone) it is not like attachments are much of an issue anymore.

Re:Great

[Tweekster (949766)]

I have full ebooks with 200+ pages and lots of photographs and diagrams. 400-600K
That seems pretty decent.

Re:Great

[networkzombie (921324)]

How about Public Key Security, locking documents with DRM, cataloging and index collections, online and offline comments, database connectivity, digital signatures, PDF conformation verification, JavaScript capabilities, forms, highlight searches, Web capture, image extraction, legal warnings about digitally signing dynamic content, tagged PDF converter for screen readers, edit pictures within PDF files, save as XML and HTML or RTF, spell checking, save table as CSV, HTML, Text, Unicode Text, RTF, XML, or XML.

The big one is of course forms. Do any other PDF creators create PDFs with forms? Do they do it well?

I use cutePDFcreator, Foxit, and a few others but they are missing the ability to create forms. Some do it; none do it well, IMO. Without forms it's just a static document. PDF is overkill for just a portable static document. The full version of Adobe Acrobat is fantastic at creating forms. That is what makes it so special.

Re:Go Figure on France

[4D6963 (933028)]

But then again, I know many French people, and they're opposed to proprietary software becoming an ISO standard, especially with patent and copyright as it stands now here in the US.

Dude, I'm French, I live in France, and not only do I not have an opinion on whether or not proprietary software becoming an ISO standard is bad, but I don't know anyone here or matter of fact anywhere who would have an opinion on this or even hear about such a process.

Where on Earth do you find your Frenchmen? And why on Earth do you all act like we're all behind this vote? We've got riots and strikes going on, but wait, PDF is about to become an ISO standard! Let's all stop burning cars to prevent this from happening! Merde, too late! What will become of us!?!

Re:Go Figure on France

[4D6963 (933028)]

I have no illusions however, they hate my fucking US guts

What the hell is wrong with you people? (Disclaimer : I'm French and I live in France). Why do Americans seem to love so much the idea that the rest of the world (and particularly the French and Arabs) hates them viscerally? The video you linked to was made by a bunch of liberal hippies who, just like all liberal hippies from San Francisco to Prague, like to bash George Bush, the military industrial complex and large corporations.

That doesn't mean we hate you, none of us hates you or America in here, you stupid fat pig!

Oh crap, did I say it out loud? I was supposed to "keep it under covers", like the sneaky Frenchman that I am..

Re:Go Figure on France

[esme (17526)]

My own personal opinion is that many of us Americans got so whipped up about France obstructing the march to war in 2002/3 (you can still find Freedom Fries on menus in some places here). And then, to add insult to the injury of the badly botched occupation, it turns out that France was right, and its obstruction was actually very wise.

So now Americans need to save face. And bashing France at every turn is a way for us to do that. And making it seem like the French hate us is even better, because it justifies our behavior.

The reality on the ground is very different of course. I remember going to Normandie around D-Day 2004, and seeing all the American flags flying. I imagine they were mostly new additions because of the anniversary and Bush's visit, but still it would be hard to imagine an American city being decked out with French flags to celebrate an occasion here. A major street in Caen is still named "Avenue du Six Juin". It was instructive to see the American bluster about France forgetting what we'd done for her, compared to the quiet steadfastness on display there.

-Esme

Re:PDF makes Baby Jesus cry

[Daengbo (523424)]

I ask a simple question: How do you re-flow a PDF to fit your browser window? Oh, you can't?

Ummm, I think it's called "Fit Page Width" in Evince. Oh, Reflow? PDF is meant to retain document formatting. It works perfectly for desktop publishing attempts.

Word processing programs aren't for desktop publishing, but most WP programs continue to try to get pixel-perfect formatting. This is the largest complaint I get from reviews of OpenOffice.org -- that it doesn't keep the same exact document formatting that the MS Word version of the document had. The mentality confuses me no end.

Lyx and pdflatex all the way, babe!

misunderstanding of OOXML issue

[HeroreV (869368)]

Apparently ISO has resolved the international standards approval bottleneck that ensued after a number of countries had applied for participating member status just before the vote on Microsoft's proposed OOXML document standard. That problem came up when all those new "participating" member countries suddenly lost interest in, er... participating anymore after the vote on OOXML.

The problem arising from OOXML occurred in subcommittee 34 (SC34) of the joint committee between ISO and IEC (JTC1). It never affected all of ISO. It still prevents SC34 from getting anything done.

The PDF specification is being approved by subcommittee 2 of technical committee 171. It has nothing to do with JTC1 and surely has nothing to do with SC34 of JTC1.

It's one thing for the average person to have no idea how ISO or IEC works, and to think the OOXML issue affects all of ISO, and to have no idea that IEC is just as affected by the OOXML issue as ISO is, but any respectable journalist should do some research and try to understand what they're reporting on.

The Inquirer should be ashamed to be associated with such bad reporting.