Several of the ISO PDF standards committees met in Ottawa, Canada last week; this is a quick catch up on the key points from each.

PDF/A – Archiving

The PDF/A committee reviewed all comments to the final ballot on ISO 19005-2 (PDF/A-2) and ratified the standard for publication. All of the meeting’s agreements will now get rolled into the text, which will then be forwarded to ISO Central Secretariat for final processing. It’s always hard to predict how long that will take, but I’m expecting publication some time in Q1 2011.

We also made some good progress on PDF/A-3, which differs from PDF/A-2 in only one respect: that any file can be embedded within it for a variety of reasons. This can be used to attach source documents (e.g. the Word file you made the PDF/A file from), measurement data used to create a graph, alternative representations etc. The embedded files don’t need to follow the same rules for being meaningfully readable at some distant point in the future as the main PDF/A content itself.

PDF/E – Engineering

The PDF/E committee agreed to start work on PDF/E-2 to enable the archiving of engineering documents. They are running into one of the most common challenges in standards work, however, in that there is widespread demand for the standard, but finding experts willing to invest time in developing it is proving difficult. Volunteers would be welcome!

PDF/UA – Universal Accessibility

The PDF/UA-1 standard is currently in what may be its final ballot before ratification, so wasn’t discussed in Ottawa. If all goes according to plan, that will be published in the second half of 2011, and may even become one leg of the next version of Section 508.

The committee started the work to develop a PDF/UA-2 standard, based on ISO 32000-2 (the next version of the ISO PDF standard itself, see below). That standard already includes a lot of work on accessibility that’s been done in preparation for its use in this way.

PDF itself

All of the comments to the last committee draft (CD) ballot on the next version of PDF (ISO 32000-2) were reviewed and resolved. Several more substantial proposals regarding topics such as what a PDF reader must do and the relationships between the various subset standards were discussed.

The committee decided that the standard is not yet solid enough to go to a ‘Draft International Standard’ (DIS) ballot, which could have been the final stage of the process. Instead it will be updated with the agreements from this meeting and then issued for another CD ballot. The results of that will be discussed in May next year, and may lead to a DIS ballot after then. If so then 32000-2 might be ratified at the end of 2011, and published in early 2012.

That’s it from the great wet North (for some reason the UK and Canada appeared to swap their early Winter weather last week).

Martin

The recent release of the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) beta has got me excited, not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the HTML 5 support is decidedly funky (check out http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/performance/psychedelicbrowsing/Default.html) but what I like is the new printing architecture. (I’m boring like that.) To quote the IE9 blurb:

“To do high quality printing of HTML5, you need a high quality print subsystem. Internet Explorer 9 directly converts web content into XPS format when sending output to the printing system. XPS is a more modern print system with native support for features such as opacity and complex paths, which results in increased fidelity and quality when printing modern web content.” 

What is often overlooked is that XPS is not just an electronic document format like PDF. As part of the XPSDRV (the printing architecture of Windows Vista and Windows 7) it is also a spool format and a page description language. When an application uses the XPS Print Path rather than GDI, the new print path maintains the XPS format from application publication to the final processing in the print driver. This streamlined printing process is quicker and does not suffer from the degradation in quality that can be a feature of older print paths. Windows 7 also expands the range of applications that can take advantage of XPS printing.

So why do I care about this? The answer is that XPS plays an important role in our free PDF creation product. We switched from PostScript-based generation to one based on XPS in the last release. For most applications printing to our virtual driver, the switch is largely irrelevant, but some, including Microsoft Office 2007 / 2010, definitely benefit. The real advantage comes when an application uses XPS from the start to do its printing. A good example is Microsoft Publisher 2010 which uses XPS printing to guarantee print quality and colour fidelity, crucial factors in publishing.  With IE9 we are seeing a mainstream application taking this advantage, as in time more applications will do.

Back to work then looking at IE9, and I’ve just discovered this:  http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Helicopter/Default.xhtml. Simple but addictive!

How does an IT administrator set up multiple PDF workflows to suit business requirements and centrally manage them?  Well, today’s launch of gDoc PDF Server™ Version 5.1 makes that easy enough with a simple drag and drop management interface.
gDoc PDF Server enables IT administrators to configure and centrally control multiple PDF workflows. Their PC or Mac users can create PDF files from any file format by selecting a “print to PDF” option, with a single click from Microsoft Office to the integrated toolbar, or by delivering their PostScript®, TIFF™ or EPS files to hot folders.  Version 5.1 includes updated platform support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32- and 64-bit) and Windows 7 clients. In addition the integration with Microsoft Office has been updated with a ribbon toolbar, for Office 2007 and Office 2010.
PDF settings can be configured for each workflow path, depending on the destination of the document.  The IT administrator retains central control over monitoring and job scheduling, so for example, for high volumes of documents, load-balancing across multiple servers.  From where the user sits the conversion process happens seamlessly with minimum performance impact as the server does all the work.
Why not give it a try by downloading the gDoc PDF Server trial?