Adobe and industry standards

From PostScript® to Adobe® PDF, Adobe has a tradition of establishing, supporting, and promoting standards. That tradition continues with our commitment to building technology solutions that embrace industry standards and meet customer requirements.

Adobe is an active member of key standards bodies, working groups, and industry associations that develop standards — including XML-based industry standards. We contribute ongoing resources and publish, review, and share technology.

Adobe is known for developing the Portable Document Format (PDF), which became a de facto standard and is now a de jure standard known as ISO 32000-1. Exemplifying innovation through standards, PDF is everywhere. From day one, the PDF specification was publicly published by Adobe without any licensing restrictions, which helped it become the de facto worldwide standard for the reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents. On January 29, 2007, Adobe announced its intent to release the full PDF 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ISO published the approved ISO 32000-1 standard based upon PDF 1.7 in July 2008. ISO will also produce future versions of the PDF specification. This provides a formal, open standard for the more than one billion PDF files in existence today and guides the hundreds of developers creating software to process PDF files.

Adobe also released control of the PRC (Product Representation Compact) specification for 3D visualization to ISO. As an extension of the ISO 32000 standard effort, ISO is working to standardize the open PRC specification, which supports Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) as an additional 3D data structure, as part of the PDF/E standard. Along with U3D, PRC is being embraced by the standards community as a robust, neutral file format for 3D engineering data exchange and long-term archival.

AIIM issued a press release announcing the formation of a working group to develop the open Adobe Systems PRC specification as an ISO standard. To find out more, refer to the FAQ on AIIM's website. The project will specify an open file format for creating different representations of 3D models. Previous to ISO establishing a standard for full PDF 1.7, ISO created standards for specialized PDF use in vertical markets:

• PDF/X for publishing, ISO 15930
• PDF/A for archiving, ISO 19005
• PDF/E for engineering, ISO 24517

More recently, Adobe participated in developing the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard for use of ISO 32000 PDF digital signatures in the European Union, resulting in the publication of the five-part standard ETSI TS 102 778 in June 2009:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Innovating further, Adobe developed Adobe LiveCycle® ES, a software suite that helps organizations improve productivity and automate processes.