The ISO TC171 PDF committees are meeting in Hamburg, Germany this week. The first two days have been devoted to the next version of the PDF standard, to be called ISO 32000-2.

Discussions so far this week, following on from those in Beijing, China last October, indicate that there will be no particular ‘theme’ to 32000-2. PDF is such a mature and complete specification already that we’re essentially adding and clarifying to enable more sophisticated implementations of much the same use cases as already exist. As examples:

• · The PDF/UA (Universal Access) committee has made a number of proposals for extensions to PDF to enable more complete assistive technologies to be built for those with visual, physical or other disabilities. I’m proud to have been the inspiration behind one new feature (enabling line numbers to be treated as a new class of page artefact) that we approved on Monday.
• · Adobe has submitted some private PDF extensions for adoption in the next standard.
• · A number of aspects of new work in the International Color Consortium (ICC) have already been accepted, and we’re expecting several more to be put forward.
• · The Japanese delegation has emphasised the importance of the legal inviolability of PDF documents and requested support for extended digital signatures based around CAdES-A.
• · There are some places where the current text has loopholes and minor inconsistencies that people have identified as needing clarification.

So far the PDF committee has not rejected any requests outright. If the organisation asking for a change can clearly set out a use case for the feature requested then it has been agreed. In some cases we’ve amended the proposal slightly, often by making the structures more optional than originally requested.

The relationship between the ‘main’ PDF standard (32000) and the PDF subset standards such as PDF/A (archive), PDF/E (engineering), PDF/VT (variable & transactional) and PDF/X (professional print) is also being clarified. The committee has been adamant that PDF should remain a superset of all the subsets. To that end we’ve adopted requests to:

• · Expand and correct the description of output intents in PDF
• · Add some additional data structures to carry a hierarchy of metadata associated with page ranges in a PDF file. They were originally formulated to enable more efficient variable and transactional printing, but may well be more generally useful. These will be optional in PDF, but required in PDF/VT.
• · Add a first outline of a structure to enable files that are not intended to conform to any of the subsets to use some of the features added for one of the subsets reliably. Thus a file could explicitly ask that the reader use an embedded output intent, even if it’s not a PDF/A or PDF/X file. This one is going into the current draft more as a straw man to allow people to consider its implications more broadly.

We’re going to be moving to a first working draft (WD) ballot coming out of this meeting, but we’re still a long way from finished. The committee is taking the view that PDF is just so mature and stable right now that we’re going to take our time and be sure not to rock the boat.

Even though it’s mature and stable, there were some things that snuck past us in 32000-1 (probably inevitable in 750+ pages). Some are obvious production errors (‘£’ should be “less than or equal to”). Others are the kind of detailed clarifications that we’ve spent some time discussing this week. We agreed to work towards an errata document (a “technical corrigendum” in ISO speak) for 32000-1 to cover these. Unfortunately the ISO rules limit the number of errata that can be issued; we can’t do it as a live document with multiple updates. As a result we’re planning on taking our time and making sure we catch as much as we can in one go. We’ll do our best to be as inclusive as possible in the process to avoid a two-speed PDF ecosystem, where those in the know have access to draft errata and those outside the committee don’t.

Two days of PDF down. Just the rest of the week to go.

Microsoft has announced that Office 2007 SP2 will ship within the next month or so.

For quite a while now those enterprising individuals who have taken the time to look on the Microsoft web site have been able to download and install support into Office 2007  for exporting documents as PDF and XPS, and for importing and exporting ODF files. On the other hand many users didn’t know that the downloads were available, or worked under a corporate policy that prevented them from installing them. SP2 moves this functionality to a push model so that anyone who uses Microsoft update will get it automatically.

I’m going to show my age now …

Time was when the strongest reason for buying a big and expensive application for viewing and (rather limited) editing of PDF files was because that was the only way you could get a reliable tool for making the files in the first place. Jaws PDF Creator was one of the few high-quality PDF creation solutions that could be purchased separately.

And now the office suite with (probably?) the largest user base worldwide will provide you with that ability for free, catching up with many other suites that have been able to do so for some time.

What does this mean for Global Graphics? Is it the end of an era? Should we shut up shop on PDF creation?

Well, no, of course not. While the difficulty of making PDF files has decreased over time the need to do more than just read and review the results has greatly increased. That’s why the emphasis is shifting from creation to maximising productivity in post-creation tasks in our up-coming releases. Hitting the right feature set and making it as easy as possible for people to achieve their needs are our focus.

And PDF creation? Well, the market has turned round, you don’t buy the editor to get the creator any more but you can get the creator bundled with the editor …

So this isn’t yet the end of an era. As Winston Churchill said (about far more serious matters than office productivity): “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”