Introduction - Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction - page 2

capabilities of Acrobat. Adobe spent a fortune on developing PDF, so how could you make money giving
away a program?
Further, who would encourage competitors to build plug-ins, and encourage competitors to develop
with Adobe intellectual capital? John proved to be crazy as a fox. Over 750 million copies of the Acrobat
Reader and Adobe Reader have been downloaded. The reader's name was changed to “Adobe” Reader at
the release of Acrobat 6 to avoid confusion between the software and reader products.
Some of the brightest programmers in the world have added to the Adobe product by developing added
functionality, making Acrobat and its Reader much greater than the sum of its parts.
Build It and They Will Come - PDF Standards
A major problem with the computer world has been the lack of standardization. PDF is becoming the
standard for multiple industries. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has created, or is
currently developing, several standards for PDF.
PDF/X (PDF Graphics eXchange) is a series of standards for the commercial printing industry. 1 Files
adhering to these standards are guaranteed to produce printed files exactly as the creator intended. Although
this standard is of limited value to the AEC world, it started the development of standards in different
arenas of PDF use.
PDF/A Standard
Another PDF standard, PDF/A (PDF Archival) is currently in development. Several US agencies, including
the US Federal Court System and the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), have
been instrumental in motivating the development of the PDF/A standard.
An ISO committee was formed to set standards for PDF files that would be usable 50 years in the
future. The standard will set minimum resolution for raster images, determine features that will not be
acceptable, such as links to URLs that will probably be long gone, or embedding of multimedia formats
that in all likelihood will be obsolete. The standard requires that only non-proprietary formats be used. The
PDF/A standard will be released by the time this topic is printed. 2
PDF/E Standard
The AEC world has been extremely fragmented. While there are several very good computer-aided design
(CAD) and geographical information system (GIS) programs, there is no single program that is good for all
branches of AEC. As a result, we are faced with numerous proprietary formats, each requiring a proprietary
viewer. It is true that some of these formats may have a few features that are superior to current PDF
features, but the ability to bring everything together in one format greatly exceeds the benefits of these
select few features.
Several of the greatest engineering groups in the world are working together to produce an ISO
Standard PDF/E (PDF Engineering) which will adapt the current standard to meet AEC needs. The
preliminary discussions and development committees are formed under the auspices of the Association for
Information and Image Management (AIIM). 3
1 See ISO 15929:2002 [1]
2 See ISO/DIS 19005-1 [2]
3 PDF-Engineering Committee, AIIM [3]