PDF-R 2007-002, July 16-17, 2007 Meeting

 

PDF-R 2007-002

July 17, 2007

 

Draft Meeting Minutes

July 16-17, 2007

Howard University Continuing Education Center

Silver Spring, MD

 

1. Introduction and Welcome

 

The meeting was called to order at 9:30 a.m. On behalf of AIIM and ANSI, Ms. Fanning welcomed everyone to the meeting. Since the ISO version of PDF Reference is in the ISO Fast Track, Ms. Fanning reviewed the fast track process and the criteria for designating proposed standards for the fast track process. (Presentation slides are posted on the committee page and distributed to the listserv.)

 

The following participated in the two day meeting of the U.S. Committee for ISO PDF Reference held on July 16-17, 2007:

 

Nora Calvillo                                                                  Adobe Systems

Jane Cohen                                                                   DTIC

Wang Donglin                                                                China

Ebony Dowtin                                                                AIIM

Ferass Elrayes                                                              Netcentric Tech

Betsy Fanning                                                               AIIM

Scott Foshee                                                                 Adobe Systems

Mark Gavin                                                                    Appligent

Diana Helander                                                              Adobe Systems

Duff Johnson                                                                  Document Solutions

John Iobst                                                                     NAA

Stephen Levenson                                                          Admin. Offices U.S. District Courts

Dave McAllister                                                              Adobe Systems

Dave McDowell                                                              NPES

Jim King                                                                        Adobe Systems

Dennis Newman                                                 PFS Corporation

Beth Panozzo                                                                NARA

Leonard Rosenthol                                                         Adobe Systems

Paul Showalter                                                              IRS

Susan Sullivan                                                               NARA

Melonie Warfel                                                               Adobe Systems

Jo Terri Wright                                                               Bentley

 

2. Background Information - Overview of PDF Reference

 

Mr. Jim King provided an overview of the work on preparing the PDF Reference for ISO. (See the document ISO Formatting.) The technical content of the PDF Reference was maintained in the ISO version. The derived ISO draft was prepared for the following reasons:

 

• - Removal of references to Adobe and Adobe product information that is in the Adobe PDF Reference so that the document is vendor neutral
• - Use of the ISO template and style rules to enable future versions to be more easily produced by the common and familiar ISO processes
• - Removal of obsolete material
• - Tighten the specification by removing chances for misinterpretations by following ISO terminology rules.

 

The specific changes include:

 

• - Using the words shall, should, may, can, etc. appropriately as defined by ISO
• - Changing the language from American English to International English
• - Separating the normative and informative content
• - Changed or removed references to Adobe, Acrobat or other Adobe products that were inappropriate for a vendor neutral standard
• - Removed obsolete material that was being maintained for Adobe product historical reasons.

 

The first step in preparing the draft was for the Adobe technical writer to create a map of the PDF published Framemaker version and the ISO Framemaker version.  Changes were made to the security, transparency and overprint areas to strengthen the standard.

 

It was noted by Mr. Mark Gavin that ISO 32000 was a beautiful draft but that there were technical issues. Mr. Dave McDowell recommended that the US committee and Adobe endorse a strong statement providing assurances that the two documents are technically equivalent.

 

3. Working session - Discussion on PDF Reference (ISO 32000)

 

The committee reviewed the technical comments identified by Mr. Gavin. These included:

 

7.33

The real numbers specified is an implementation limit.

 

7.3.7

Generally PostScript was removed from ISO 32000, however, it was left in this section and could have been removed. It could become an informative note. The Absent Entry, is new terminology which is undefined and is equivalent to an entry that is not there. Multiple entries are legal in existing files but have been restricted in the draft. The disallowing makes it simpler and provides a better conformance requirement by disallowing multiple entries.

 

The committee discussed bad files and will recommend that rules be added for compliance.

 

7.3.8.1

Streams may be of unlimited length. The reference to operating systems was removed and implementation was changed to architectural.

 

It was noted that white space around EndStream needs to be clarified.

 

7.3.10

In the second paragraph, a sentence was removed because the statement was not true. Numbers do not need to be maintained.

 

7.4.1

This is the first mention of conforming writers. It is necessary to define what a conforming writer will do or what it means.

 

The committee discussed malformed files and agreed that it is easier to crate a conformance tool based on the clarity of the draft standard.

 

Page 41 - a new restriction was added by stating that ASCII filters shall not be used in an encrypted file. This addition was the result of the Adobe Encryption Team's review of the document.

 

7.4.3

Conditions stated cause errors to occur. This should be normalized in a different way.

 

7.4.4.1

TIFF needs to be included in the bibliography and the exact version identified.

 

Page 56 before 7.4.10

SMask not present - The old text states it "is not needed" and was changed to "shall not be present". This was an example of the tightening of the language to conform to the ISO verb usage.

 

7.4.10

States that the Crypt Filter is the first filter in an array. It was noted that the document should be consistent with the order of the filter decrypting.

 

Committee members were requested to review the draft and provide comments for discussion. AIIM Staff will add a page to the PDF wiki which can be found at http://pdf.editme.com/ for the comments to be recorded.

 

It was noted that the number of pages in the ISO formatted draft is less than the published draft. While there is a page count difference, the printable square inch space is almost the same with the published version coming in at 49,248 sq inches and the ISO formatted version at 48,224 sq inches.

 

The issue of Intellectual Property was addressed and the committee was reminded that a step in designating a fast track standard is that the Intellectual Property and Patent issues are handled prior to the document being classified as a fast track. It was also noted that the committee must rely on ISO to enforce their Intellectual Property policy with regard to this document and to be assured that there will be no patent issues. Adobe assured the committee that they have taken care to provide the appropriate letter and forms for the Intellectual Property issues to be resolved.

 

The endorsement statement proposed for the US committee to have sent to other ISO TC 171 member countries is as follows:

 

The Adobe objective in creating the ISO Draft of PDF Reference 1.7 was to create a document that was both easier to read and understand, and more in line with the style requirements of the international standards community.  The key goals during that process were to insure that the resultant document was technically consistent with the PDF Reference 1.7 published by Adobe in November 2006 and to also incorporate the interpretations of that specification provided by and to both industry and Adobe PDF application developers. This ensures that existing PDF files will be compatible with ISO draft PDF Reference 1.7.

 

The members of the US technical committee who have reviewed and the Adobe technical experts who created the ISO draft of PDF Reference 1.7 are convinced that these documents are technically equivalent, in spite of the many changes in wording which were required.  That is to say, existing valid PDF files and files created in accordance with, or evaluated against, either document will produce the proper results.

 

The members of the US PDF committee of TC 171 urge the other national body members to support this proposed work item and DIS draft of ISO 32000, Document management - Portable document format - PDF Reference 1.7.

 

To be able to endorse the statement, committee members are requested to review the ISO draft and provide comments between this meeting and August 28. We will obtain agreement on the statement by August 31. Jim King and Leonard Rosenthol will review the comments posted to the wiki and provide insight to the comments posted.

 

4. Review of Standards Process

 

A review of the process including an overview of the ISO Procedures, balloting process, committee roles at both the US and ISO levels, participation and use of the listserv and wiki were presented by Betsy Fanning and Ebony Dowtin. (Presentations are included on the committee web page.)

 

The committee nominated and approved Paul Showalter and Duff Johnson as chairs for the US committee. These appointments will be approved by an email ballot of  the AIIM Standards Board. Mr. Showalter's nomination was moved and seconded by Susan Sullivan and Dennis Newman. Mr. Johnson's nomination was moved and seconded by Dennis Newman and Mark Gavin. Both appointments were unanimously accepted by the meeting participants.

 

The US committee will propose at the first ISO meeting for this work to nominate Jim King as the project editor/leader (Stephen Levenson/Jane Cohen). Additionally, Nora Calvillo will be nominated for the role of Working Group convenor as proposed by Melonie Warfel and Jo Terri Wright. The committee unanimously endorsed these proposed appointments.

 

The ISO meeting is being planned to be held sometime from January 10 to 24 in Florida.

 

5. Brainstorming for PDF 1.X

 

It was noted that the standard should define how a PDF standard compliant file should be created. Other groups should provide recommendations for features to be included in the PDF standard to the PDF committee. It is important that the PDF committee remain pure as it relates to the standard but should cooperate and work with other ISO committees and listen to the recommendations.

 

The committee discussed if the ISO PDF Reference work should be proposed to be in an SC of its own rather than being assigned to a working group under TC 171 SC2. It was noted that there is strength in having the work take place under SC2. There was not agreement that SC2 provides strength to the work. No consensus was achieved for having an SC created for the PDF work.

 

The need for a structure to be developed to coordinate the work of the ISO PDF working group and the other PDF efforts was discussed. The coordination of the work will be through the distribution of the drafts to all SC2 members where the PDF work is being performed. Additionally, the PDF working group may issue a resolution for liaison relationships to be created and for the PDF meetings to be synchronized to allow for the PDF committees to share issues and recommendations. The synchronization will begin with the first ISO meeting for the PDF work which will take place in January 2008. It was noted that the flow of information will be better but that liaison relationships will be beneficial to the work for the ISO working group.

 

The committee discussed how the PDF/A and PDF/E standards subset the PDF Reference standard. It was noted that the PDF committee will need to keep an idea of how to make the work of the subgroups conducive to the PDF standard. This means that the PDF committee will need to be more cognizant of what the subgroups are working on and to have formal liaison representatives participate in the PDF committee.

 

It was noted that a liaison with ICC will need to be established for the ISO PDF working group.

 

Each of the subgroups established goals to guide their work. It was noted that the ISO PDF working group should establish similar goals and then the working group should identify common goals between the PDF Working Group and the PDF subset working groups. The committee recommended that the first meeting of the PDF Working group should include presentations from each of the PDF subset working groups on who they are and what they do.

 

Each version of the PDF Reference is uniquely numbered with a major and a minor version number separated by a period. The major number would change if major changes were made to the version. It was recommended that it may be good to move to 2.0 with the first revision of the ISO version of the PDF standard. The US will recommend that the PDF standard use parts and the PDF version utilize the part number as the major revision number. This will allow the minor number to be used for technical corrigendum, revisions, and addendums.

 

The committee discussed including the referenced external standards on a web page located on the AIIM web site to provide a repository for the documents included in ISO 32000. Establishing this repository is a 'nice to have' for version 1 and a 'must have' for future versions. Adobe and AIIM will establish a list of references that should be archived other than with Adobe.

 

AIIM staff was requested to issue a formal request to TC130 to ask them to review ISO/DIS 32000 and provide recommendations.

 

The following is a list of new features discussed to be included in the first revision of the PDF Standard:

 

1. Incorporate the 3D algorithm, PRC into Part 2.
2. Portable collections/packages - extension of the functionality
3. Addition of vertical areas specifically for the Architecture Engineering Construction/Building industry with includes improved measurement, 2D and 3D and focusing on CAD drawings of buildings
4. Hyperlinks on objects and not an area which is an alternate way of linking
5. Integrate MathML, Multimedia and CL tags into the tag set (need to directly embed MathML and XML in the tag tree)
6. Enable N-Channel ICC profiles as source profiles to support ICC requirements
7. Output Profiles enhancement (multiple Output Intents) to address RGB workflows and abstract profiles
8. Remove or improve Cross referencing via the XRef table.
9. Move to an XML coded file (Adobe MARS is a subset of what PDF can and could do
10. As the PDF Reference exist today it is like a dictionary, only a partial reference that does not tell one how to use it to draw content together. Postscript has two other books that tell how to use it. We could produce a Technical Report or How to guide.
11. Identify the 3 levels of data - data, super data, and metadata
12. Collections metadata in order to reconstruct the collection
13. Add freedom for CMYK to provide multiple ways to represent color that would be non-unique.
14. Support for DeviceLink profiles.
15. Improved file provinence and "audit trails".

 

Jim King offered the following link for presentations on XML - http://home.comcast.net/~JK05/presentations.

 

The committee discussed the potential to add a sentence to the end of the endorsement statement that offers a US representative to speak with the other member country representatives to review the changes made between the published PDF reference and the ISO version.

 

6. Wrap-up

 

The committee refined the committee chair roles agreeing to have Paul Showalter be the chair and Duff Johnson the vice-chair.

 

The meeting schedule for the US PDF committee has been established as follows:

 

• - August 8 - Conference call at 1 p.m. Eastern
• - September - Conference call meeting to finalize the endorsement statement
• - November 13-14 - Face-to-Face meeting - San Jose, CA to prepare for the first ISO meeting

 

The action items resulting from this meeting:

 

• - All committee members are requested to review ISO 32000 and post comments on the wiki page.
• - AIIM Staff is to create a wiki page on the PDF wiki to collect the comments.
• - Committee members who are on other PDF committees are invited to request their committees to submit proposed new features.
• - Formal request to TC130 for new feature recommendations was deferred.
• - Liaisons with ICC and other groups was deferred until after ISO 32000 (PDF 1.7) is approved.
• - AIIM and Adobe will work together to establish a repository of non-ISO standards referenced in ISO 32000.

 

The committee expressed appreciation to AIIM for the meeting logistics.

 

7. Adjournment

 

The two day meeting was adjourned at 2:14 p.m. on July 17, 2007.  (Rosenthol/Cohen)