One Last Thing! PDF as an Open Standard

I am one of those people (spouses, more like it) who’ll have this kind of conversation each night:

Kim: I’m hungry.
Coté: OK, just a minute, I need to finish up a post!
[Two hours later. It’s gotten dark.]
Coté: all done!
Kim: I already ate.

So, I thought “why not have a new format called ‘One Last Thing!’ wherein I write in ‘a minute’ what I could take 2 hours to write.”

So, here is your first installment. Then it’s off to cook some orange roughy and beets.

(Let’s see if I can actually do it.)

PDF to AIIM/ISO

Last week, Adobe pre-briefed us on today’s announcement about kicking off the process to make PDF an open standard via AIIM to ISO. There’s always devil spotting in the details and this will take quite some time to fully pan out (standards!), but overall I’m exuberant about it. I like both PDF as a medium and open standards as A Way of Life. I’ve lamented the resulting frienemy status before, which will hopfully become less “-emy” and more “frien-“

Each time I’m harsh about the openness of something at Adobe, they surprise me by becoming a tad more open. Sure, I emphasis “tad” there, and I’m also incredibly sympathetic to how tedious and lengthy change is at large, established companies. But at the very least I probably won’t be “surprised” next time.

For those who want more, we know that our resident Document Dork will cover this is more depth soon.

And, I echo Steve’s compliments of Duane. Indeed, it should be noted that Duane seems to have done “the press release as we wish press releases were” for this announcement which, hopefully, the folks chewing over “do we still new press releases” question will have noticed.

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