Adobe Releases PDF to the World

In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.

Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.