PDF’s new status: stable
December 15, 2008 —
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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solid now, its wayward past can make things sticky for developers saddled with archives of old documents or a legion of outdated client-side applications.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.”
Related Search Term(s): PDF, Adobe, ISO
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