The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will now be in control of Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). The new standard, ISO 32000-1, Document management - Portable document format - Part 1: PDF 1.7, is not only an excessively long name but its also based on version 1.7 of PDF.

The PDF format was created in 1993 and has become the standard format for creating documents for viewing and printing. The format does have several problems. Fonts that require a licence do not get embedded in a PDF which causes all sorts of problems when trying to print the document. Instead of the correct font appearing, it will default to Courier instead. Colour separation and colour matching are also difficult to do in a PDF.

There are many PDF creators and viewers, but the only ones that really work properly are Adobe’s products. I haven’t used anything displays documents as accurately as Acrobat Reader, and Acrobat Distiller still produces the cleanest PDF’s.

All of this may change with the ISO standardization.

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