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PDF’s new status: stable


By Alex Handy
December 15, 2008 — 
The Portable Document Format became an ISO standard less than half a year ago, and since the July 1 release of ISO 32000-1:2008, nothing has changed.

That’s the best news developers could have hoped to hear.  

Before the ISO transfer, PDF belonged entirely to its creator, Adobe Systems, and had traveled a bumpy road since its 1993 debut. Along the way, Adobe repeatedly changed the specifications for the document format, including one wholesale break with the past that left non-Adobe software out in the cold for a time. But now, thanks to PDF’s ISO status, developers will no longer have to hit a target in motion.

That’s not to say PDF won’t evolve. Indeed, the ISO currently oversees five variations of the format for different use cases. Some of them—such as PDF/X, for graphics exchange—are actually umbrellas for subsets of specifications. Others target specific markets, such as PDF/H, for healthcare.

No matter what type of PDF you’re working with, the biggest problems can come from the oldest files. While the PDF standard is solid now, its wayward past can make things sticky for developers saddled with archives of old documents or a legion of outdated client-side applications.

Sticking points
“When I started looking at PDF, I was hoping it would be easy,” said CEO Andrew Cochran of ceTe Software, which makes DynamicPDF, a set of class libraries designed to deal with the format in an enterprise environment. “But the specification is complex and large. It’s not a straightforward thing to create a PDF document.

“The biggest thing is that it’s hard to create a PDF in one pass. You have to first get all the info about the document, then you have to create the document. It’s a two-phase process. I wouldn’t say it was extremely complicated, but it wasn’t what we were used to working on websites. There, as you encounter the data, you spit it to the browser.

“With a PDF, you can’t do that. You have to understand the fonts, the widths of the characters and how to break the lines. Anything that affects the pagination is what you have to understand. You have to lay it out before you output it. You have to calculate how much of that text is going to fit on the first page.”

Such formatting problems are increasingly falling on developers’ shoulders, thanks to corporate document retention policies and the ever-increasing need for print-on-demand. “In the beginning, PDF was used in specialized applications,” said Cochran. “Now most development teams are encountering a need for PDF. It seems to me like a lot of developers have a hard time avoiding PDF these days.”

Evolving standards
Dany Amiouny, CTO of Amyuni, said the biggest problem he sees for developers is the proliferation of variant standards.

“The PDF format has evolved a lot [over the] years, and there are many PDF tools out there that generate all kinds of PDF files,” Amiouny said. “You can find all kinds of PDF files with all kinds of features in them, which makes PDF not exactly a standard. This is why Adobe has come out with standards like PDF/A, for document archivers.”

Amyuni produces a number of tools targeted at developers who need to generate or convert PDF files in their software. In Amiouny’s view, it’s not the older files that are troublesome.

“The newer files are more problematic than the older files,” he said. “For example, about two years ago Adobe changed the format of the [standard PDF] in such a way that older versions of PDF readers [were] not able to read new PDF files. They changed the internal binary format of the PDF file.”

The compatibility headaches don’t end there, said Amiouny. “One pitfall is to use fancy new features that are in the format. We can quickly fall into the trap of seeing a new feature and saying, ‘Let’s go and use that.’ This makes our customers unhappy with the product. PDF/A and PDF/X have specifications that will not allow the use of new features.”

Thus, Amiouny said, “What we try to do is use new features only when it’s absolutely a necessity. We expect people are using only the 1.5 or 1.4 feature set.”

Bad self-image
Further pitfalls can come at the hands of embedded objects, such as images, video and external links, said Cochran. “There are only certain image formats that are supported. When we get an image from a developer, we have to make that into something that can be presented in the PDF,” he said.

“Memory usage on the output is another thing,” Cochran added. He said that repeating images used in a PDF can be stored once and referenced multiple times. “If you can share those, you can increase performance as well as reduce the output size of the PDF.”

The various compatibility issues are magnified when PDFs come from non-Adobe sources. When pulling information from a website or a Word document, the challenges to developers can increase as parsing and output become closely tied together.

“Conversion was one [requirement] we saw for a long time; people wanted to convert [Microsoft] Office documents and store them. We’re releasing a converter product that does that. We also have an embedded viewer if developers don’t want to rely on an external viewer. This is embeddable in a Windows Forms application,” said Cochran.

The issues aren’t likely to be resolved overnight, but the evolution of PDF as a standard within the ISO should keep a lid on further problems and incompatibilities, Cochran added.

Amiouny agrees. He said he expects the PDF standard to become even more popular now that those with vested interests in the format can take part in its evolution.

Chief among those entities will be the government, he predicted. “Because PDF is used so much in all kinds of government forms and tax preparations and so on, government agencies have to put work into how the format should evolve.”

Indeed, many organizations and people can now rely on PDF as a stable and future-ready standard. While Adobe is currently working on an XML-based replacement, code named Mars, PDF is unlikely to vanish anytime soon. This newspaper, for example, was sent to the printer as a PDF file.

As the demands for enterprise document retention and creation continue to increase, Cochran and Amiouny are betting the future will be both printable and portable.


Related Search Term(s): PDF, Adobe, ISO


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