PDF Reference as Standard

In December, we announced that the PDF Reference as an ISO standard (ISO 32000) was approved with one negative. After a meeting in January, the international working group was able to resolve the negative comment so that the negative vote was changed from Negative to Affirmative with Comment. This change means that the standard is fully approved and will be published soon.

After dealing with the comments, the working group began discussions on the next version of the standard by identifying features that should be included in the next version of the standard. The following are some of the ideas the committee is discussing for future versions of ISO 32000:

3D, CAD, Engineering

• Incorporate the 3D algorithm, PRC into Part 1
  
• Improved measurement, 3D, focus on CAD
  
• Non-Scaling lines and patterns
  
• GIS features
  

Document Features

• Extensions to portable collections (packages)
  
• Hyperlinks on objects and not an area
  
• Use of native Unicode in PDF page content streams
  
• Root-level dictionary of all used resources
  
• Clarification of resourced inheritance when rendering
  
• Associate annotations (especially comments) directly with page content
  
• Improved file provenance and "audit trails"
  
• Per-page metadata
  

Accessiblity

• MathML Integration
  
• New Tag Types
  

Color

• Enable N-Colorant ICC profiles as source profiles
  
• Output intent enhancement
  
• Black Point Compensation
  
• Add processing instruction for color conversion
  
• Support for DeviceLink profiles
  
• Specify exactly how color has to be rendered on an output device
  
• No more uncalibrated color in a PDF
  
• Extend color model for better support of spot colors and overprints between spot colors (and with process colors)
  

Architecture

• Remove or improve cross-referencing via XRef table
  
• Move to an XML coded file
  
• Multiple levels of data
  
• Support for Newspaper XML document instances and related style-sheets

If you would like to contribute thoughts on the above items or have features you would like to recommend be included in a future version of ISO 32000, Document management – Portable Document Format (PDF), please feel free to send your questions and/or recommendations to bfanning@aiim.org. If you would like to participate in this effort of revising the PDF file format, please let us know that as well by sending an email to bfanning@aiim.org.