Now Unanimous!

This is a great day! This is about the program that Adobe, AIIM, and ANSI put together just less than one year ago to move PDF 1.7 under public control as an ISO standard. We submitted the suggestion to ISO and they agreed. A lot has happened since then and I have written several previous articles (here and here) about what was happening in this blog.

Well today the French Standards committee which was the only country committee to submit a negative vote on our recent ballot has reviewed my responses to their comments and decided that if those changes in the specification are made they will change their vote to positive. That will make it unanimous!

Let me say all this a little more carefully.  In one of my previous blogs I noted that the results of the ISO Draft International Standard (DIS) ballot for PDF 1.7 due December 2, 2007 was 13 in favor and 1 opposed (the French).  The ballots also had room for editing comments against the DIS and 205 came in including a bunch from the French. Next week (Jan. 21-23, 2008) in Orlando, Florida, the International committee (TC 171/SC 2) will meet to decide which edits, if any, need to be made to the DIS document before it can be published as the official ISO 32000 standard.

After the ballot ended in December, as the acting technical project leader, I drafted responses to all the comments so we would have a starting point for the discussion next week in Orlando. The Secretariat of ISO TC 171/SC 2 sent the comments that the French made back to them, together with my recommendations, asking if they would change their vote to positive if we followed my recommendations.  (Knowing the Secretariat I assume there was some very diplomatic exchanges that took place as well.) And I just now got word that they decided that the suggested resolution to their comments would be good enough.  Whew!

Now we have to get everyone (14 countries) together next week and go over all the comments and make sure all the countries are comfortable with the suggested treatment or decide on a new treatment. I did recommend rejecting quite a few of the comments as being misunderstandings or out of scope, including some that the French made.

I have talked about my responses to the 205 comments. They are mine as the acting project editor but I must confess that I got a lot of help from PDF experts in drafting them especially a great team of experts within Adobe. So they are only mine in the sense of being responsible. I would single out Ed Taft and Leonard Rosenthol as having been invaluable colleagues in this work.

I am confident that the committee will be able to amiably resolve all 205 comments and we can then send the edited version off to Switzerland to become a published ISO standard. 

If the French would have stuck with their negative vote, then we would have to do pretty much the same thing except wait for two months after the edited document is produced and then sent out as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS). Then the votes would be either thumbs up or thumbs down with no edits possible. Seems like a wasted 2 months in any case, but now we will not have to do that.  Thanks to the French!

Wish me luck next week.

Contact: jking@adobe.com