At the end of January 2007, Adobe submitted its Portable Document Format (PDF) to the ISO. Now, as the year winds to a close, Adobe has announced that PDF 1.7 has been approved by the ISO and will become the ISO 32000 standard (DIS).

Although previous subsets of PDF (specifically PDF/Archive and PDF/Exchange) have been considered by the ISO, the approval of the entire document format as a new standard will impact its development in the future. From this point forward, the ISO, rather than Adobe, is in charge of the PDF specification and any changes that are incorporated into it. According to King, none of the current licensing terms for the PDF standard will change, as it's already licensed for free and readily available to anyone wishing to develop software capable of reading, writing, or processing PDF, but he posits that Adobe's Acrobat suite might see an increased level of competition from other companies as a result of the ISO certification.

I wasn't even aware of that this was in the pipeline. Now only if they'll turn over SWFs!