Inside PDF

After my last blog announcing the positive vote for PDF to complete the Draft International Standard (DIS) phase of becoming an ISO standard, I have gotten a lot of comments. Quite a few were comments about the ballot comments so I thought I should comment.

The 5 month ballot that just completed allowed for yes, no, or abstain votes to be accompanied by comments or editing suggestions to make the specification better or to fix errors. A positive vote implies that the standard is fine but may also include comments about minor edits that do not substantially change the specification.  Any negative ballot must be accompanied by at least one significant technical objection and those have to be addressed one way or another before the DIS can be published as the final ISO 32000-1 standard.

Since the announcement, a large number of comments to my blog asked one or both of these questions:  why did the French vote negatively, and can you point me to a place where I can find all the 205 comments that were in the ballots.  (See below.)

The answer to the second questions is, sorry but the comments will be restricted to committee members since they are considered part of the committee discussions. If you have a burning desire to read them you will have to join your country's standards organization that is responsible for ISO TC 171 SC2.

As to the first question about the negative vote by France, I have read their comments and can only give you some general information.

I can tell you that the French committee has members that know a great deal about digital signatures and spent considerable time reading the section of the ISO 32000 DIS document that covers PDF digital signatures. And I confess that the section of the ISO 32000 DIS on digital signature is one of the hardest to read. And I think the more you know about digital signatures the more you may miss some of the peculiarities of how PDF does it and object to them.

This fast track process to move PDF 1.7 from Adobe ownership to that of ISO is not the normal hammering out of the technical details for a new standard that many committee members are accustomed to. The current objective is to move PDF 1.7 to ISO management unchanged. Some experts feel that some of the choices that have been made in PDF are wrong and should be changed or improved, especially when it comes to digital signatures. OK. But we cannot change it as we move it or we can run the risk of making it not apply to those billions of PDF files currently in existence. After ISO owns it, we can carefully work out backward compatible changes to fix things people feel need fixing.  That will be ISO 32000-2 the second ISO release. 

I have nothing but warm feelings toward the French, including the people on this committee who voted no. I am delighted that they spent that much time looking over the specification and got interested enough to make constructive criticisms. They are going to make great partners on the ISO committees which will make PDF better and better over time.  The single negative vote is not a big picture item and no one should carry any negative feelings toward this committee for doing the job as they saw it. This is how this process is supposed to work.

Here are a sampling of the comments I got about these two subjects:

• Is there a link for the comments on the ballot? What key objections or concerns were raised by France that prevented an unanimous ballot? – Andrew Mossberg
• I would like to read the negative comments, that would be more interesting than the news itself.. =(  – bob
• Hey, is the list of comments somewhere on the net? Would love to have a look at it. – Evgeni
• What are the main reasons why france voted no? Would be interesting to know your analysis on that. thanks. – Sid
• Why did France object?  – Al
• Why France has voted negative? I'm french, and I don't agree with the french vote.  – Frenchy
• Does anyone know which issues made the French vote "no" ???  – Paganel
• Are those comments public? If yes, where can they be found?  – Alex
• Is there someplace where we can read all the comments?  –  Lemi4 aka. fERDI:)
• Congrats on the achievement, and PDF's formalization as an ISO standard. I'd be fascinated to read the comments made, so are these archived anywhere?  I'd be even more interested to hear the rationale behind France's "no" vote.  –  Ian Farquhar
• Is there anywhere where we can see the comments?  I'm curious to know what France objected to!  –  Hydrargyrum
• Do you know why France voted against it?  –  Nick

Notice that they are all nicely worded, factual and professional.  No crap. Thanks go to my readers.

My announcement blog also made it to Slash Dot where it accumulated over 300 comments. (This is the first time my tech-heavy blog has hit something like SlashDot. I think my colleague Duane Nickull is responsible.)

contact me at:  jking@adobe.com