Last week marked the most recent TC 171 annual plenary. This year’s festivities were held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and sponsored by FamilySearch and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And lest you doubt we could have fun in Salt Lake City, sponsored by the Mormons, bite your collective tongues. No, SLC isn’t Paris (which is where our plenary was last year). But if you are part of a TC focused on ECM, archiving, long-term preservation, and file formats,  SLC is pretty much going to The Source. With the LDS focus on genealogy research and preservation of records, there is no place on earth with more or better records and libraries to tour and use as exemplars. And hey, how can a place with a beer called Polygamy Porter not be fun?

The location certainly didn’t hurt our attendance. We had participation from 11 countries - Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea the UK and the US. We had great discussions in all the PDF meetings, especially in ISO 32000, which gave the gathering a real community feel.

There were four PDF committees that met last week – PDF/A (ISO 19005), PDF/E (ISO 24517 and PRC), PDF/UA (ISO 14289), and PDF Reference (ISO 32000). Each of the projects is at a pivotal point in its development, and that was reflected in the week’s activities:

• PDF/A has just signed off on publishing proofs for Part 2 and at the end of last week’s meeting sent Part 3 to DIS (Draft International Standard)  stage. Parts 2 and 3 are identical except for one key piece – Part 3 allows for the embedding of any arbitrary file type, whereas only PDF/A files may be embedded in Part 2.
• PDF/E is just getting into the heart of work on Part 2, and discussions around archiving of dynamic documents. There is also a realization that perhaps “engineering” is narrowing the focus overly much – the focus of the committee on data, 3D, and geospatial features benefits not only engineers but scientists as well. Perhaps there is a broader community that needs to become involved in order to create the optimum standard around the feature set that this group wants to work on. The PRC group was able to resolve all but a handful of its comments. Those it will finish by phone and email over the next couple of weeks, get consensus on, and move to DIS as soon as possible.
• PDF/UA is in the DIS stage. We received about 90 comments on our first DIS ballot, with some good technical comments. I’m the project leader and have been giving the US TAG Chair, Duff Johnson, a bad time about some of the comments his crew submitted, but in all fairness, they make the standard better. We’re looking forward to getting a really good solid accessibility for PDF standard out, and out soon. We will be doing another 2 month DIS ballot and then hopefully going to publication out of our next international meeting. Part 2 will be hot on its heels, building on work our committee has submitted to the PDF Reference committee for their Part 2. We have been discussing the contents of that version since last December, but won’t start the formal project until after our next meeting in late November or early December 2011.
• PDF Reference is heads down working on Part 2, or PDF 2.0. We have a small list of items left to work on. In the last few months several new subject matter experts came to the table, including folks from BlueBeam Software and Foxit Software in the US, Canon Information Systems Research Australia and new members from France, China and Korea. Comments on the CD also came from experts in Slovakia, so we look forward to their participation in future meetings. While we always have good discussions in our meetings, this one had a much more broad-based community aspect to it with the wider participation. One of the biggest turning points in the project is a changing of the guard, so to speak. Dr. Jim King, who has been the Project Leader for ISO 32000 since it began working its way through the fast track process, announced his resignation at the end of the meeting last week. We cannot begin to thank Jim enough for the efforts he has expended on behalf of the standard. His knowledge of PDF is both deep and broad, and has served the community well in moving the Adobe specification into the status of an open International Standard.
• What does this mean for ISO 32000 going forward? We’ve adopted not one, but two new Project Co-Leads to attempt to fill Jim’s shoes. One is me. The other is Duff Johnson from Appligent Document Solutions.  Neither of us has the depth or breadth of PDF knowledge that Jim can claim, nor will we pretend to.  What we do have is project leadership experience and the growing PDF community to call upon. The goal of the next phase of 32000-2 is to build the project into a fully community-driven effort and ensure that the forward progress of the standard comes from the heart and minds of that community.   PDF has become bigger than one company or a handful of subject matter experts. As an international standard, it belongs to all of us, and we all have a stake in taking it into the future. Thanks in no small part to Jim’s efforts, we are very close to having a strong PDF 2.0 defined. We just need to finish conversations around SWF and HTML, tidy up the language around fonts and digital signatures, clarify a few fine points on path/stroke/fill, finalize references, and we’re set. Once the community finishes these efforts, we’ll have a strong, new standard to build a new vision of PDF on just as ISO 32000-1 has defined the PDF we have all known and loved since 2008.

The rest of the TC 171 folks also had a busy week. There were numerous new work items identified, new projects discussed, current projects reviewed, and TC business issues dealt with. By the closing plenary on Friday morning, we were ready to return to our day jobs, all with plenty of new work in hand to keep us busy in the coming months.