In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.
Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.
[Via TechCrunch]
With as much as I follow Adobe (it’s my livelihood so I try to keep on top of what my main supplier of software is up too) I missed this. Considering the lawsuits that have popped up over the years from Adobe protecting their territory from encroachment by both low-cost and free versions of PDF creation and viewing. I’m surprised that they took this step. The fact that Adobe makes the best creation software for PDFs means this shouldn’t hurt them. Depending on what I’m wanting to make the PDF for… between Illustrator, InDesign, and Designer there isn’t anything I can’t create in PDF format. That said… I find myself using FoxIt Software’s PDF Viewer more often because it’s faster and more responsive.
