US PDF Reference Committee

The US PDF Reference Committee held its first meeting in Washington, DC on July 16-17. For a first meeting, it was well attended with representatives from various government agencies, PDF developers, and end user organizations that are major users of PDF. Even though the attendance at the meeting was good, there were several notable vendors who were absent from the meeting.

It is important to note that with Adobe's release of the PDF specification to the industry, the industry now has the opportunity to specify the direction of the next version of PDF. So, if you ever wanted PDF to do something that it could not do, now is the time to share that information.

The committee reviewed the proposed ISO version of the PDF Reference 1.7 and began to identify features to be proposed to be included in the next version of the standard. The ISO version of PDF Reference 1.7 was reformatted to fit to the ISO template for ISO standards. This involved making non-technical changes to the writing style to conform with ISO format and to further ensure that the standard was vendor neutral and aligned with existing files and implementations.

The committee will be holding a conference call meeting on August 8 and in September to continue its discussions of comments that will form the US position on the ISO/DIS ballot for the standard. Those interested in participating on the US committee (you must have a home address in the US) are welcome to contact Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org for more information.