Adobe PDF Version 1.7 Close To International StandardAdobe PDF Version 1.7 Close To International Standard

The next version of Adobe Systems' PDF document format has received overwhelming approval from an international standards body, taking the format close to final adoption.

Out of the 15 countries represented on the standards committee of the International Standards Organization, nine voted yes without comments and four gave their approval with comments, James King, PDF architect and senior principal scientist at Adobe, said in the company's Inside PDF blog. France was the only member to vote against PDF 1.7, with Russia abstaining. Italy sent comments, but is a nonvoting member of the panel.

Overall, 205 comments were submitted, which means the concerns will have to be addressed before the file format becomes ISO standard 32000. King, who was nominated by the United States as technical editor, said he would prepare responses to all the comments in time for the Jan. 21-23 meeting of the working group.

If the group can give satisfactory answers to all of the comments, especially to France, then it would be possible to publish the standard at the meeting, King said. If the process is more complicated, then the group would enter into a two-month Final Draft International Standard vote. "The FDIS votes are not accompanied by comments, so if we get no more negative votes at that time, the revised document will be the one published as ISO 32000," King said.

The U.S. was the sponsoring country for PDF 1.7, and the one with the most comments, 125. "It may seem strange that the sponsoring country is the one with the most comments, but I think that is a reflection of two things: the U.S. committee contains a lot of knowledgeable people, including several from Adobe, and we honestly found some mistakes that we felt must be corrected," King said in Tuesday's blog posting.

PDF is a popular electronic document format found in business and Web publishing. Last month, Adobe and Yahoo unveiled plans to launch a service that would insert ads into online PDF documents, and share revenue with the publishers.