by , 10:55 AM EDT, July 2nd, 2008

Adobe's PDF, or Portable Document Format, has moved beyond its ubiquitous status and is now also an ISO standard. The change means that government agencies and other organizations that require open formats for electronic documents can consider using the cross-platform standard for digital file storage and archiving.

Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer at Adobe, commented "As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years."

As part of the agreement to migrate PDF to an open standard, Adobe agreed to relinquish control to ISO. The standards organization will now be responsible for publishing information about the format standard, and will also be responsible for updating and developing future versions of the standard.

The new standard has been dubbed ISO 32000-1, Document management - Portable document format - Part 1: PDF 1.7, and is based on the current PDF 1.7 version.

ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden added "As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular format is easily available to all interested stakeholders. The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology that cuts across systems and is designed for long term survival."