JULY 2006

Adobe interview: Diana Helander

Group Manager for Worldwide Standards

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Kurt Foss talks exclusively to Diana Helander, Group Manager for Worldwide Standards for Acrobat. Diana started on the GoLive team five years ago and transferred to the Acrobat team two years ago. The interview looks at key issues around PDF/E and PDF/A adoption and the impact of a standard like PDF/A on an industry, on users and for Adobe.

Kurt Foss: How long have you been with Adobe Systems, and what is your current job title?

Diana Helander: "I've been with Adobe almost five years and my current title is Group Manager, Worldwide Standards. I started on the GoLive team and later transferred to the Acrobat team.

After Acrobat 5 launched, the team was looking to explore what else our products could do to better support the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) markets, as well as some of the mechanical engineering functions in manufacturing. I had previously worked at Autodesk and therefore was familiar with the issues involved  about exchange formats, and related to computer-assisted design (CAD) documentation and viewers. It seemed like a great fit."

Foss: Briefly explain your current role.

Helander: "I've been with the Worldwide Standards group for about two years. My work focuses primarily on the PDF-based standards, which PDF/A [PDF: 272 KB]   for archiving aand PDF/E for engineering. I've been Adobe's representative to the PDF/E working group and have also been doing some work on PDF/A as well as concentrating on the vertical-industry standards such as financial services, manufacturing, government and education."

PDF Formats and TIFF: Brief Comparison
See larger image
Download [PDF: 13 KB]  

Foss: Briefly explain some of the terminology, such as a de facto standard versus an accredited standard, a proprietary standard versus an open standard and so on.

Helander: "If you think of this as being a continuum, starting from left to right, on the left is the proprietary format  such as DOC or DWG  where a company develops and maintains a format, but does not publish the specification.

Next on that continuum would be something like PDF  developed and maintained by Adobe, but the specification is published so anybody can develop against it.

The final point on that continuum would be an open standard  something like PDF/A  that is developed, maintained and published by a standards working group in which other companies participate. Each organization gets one vote and Adobe is just one participant. The working group is led by a standards organization like the Enterprise Content Management Association (AIIM). Adobe is just one of many participants. In the case of international standards, it's one vote per country.

When we talk about the types of standards, there are two primary types and a subset of one of those. There's a de facto standard, widely used and widely accepted. There are lots of these in different industries  applications like PowerPoint for presentations, and DWG, Autodesk's CAD standard that is fairly standard in the building industry.

A de jure standard is one that's gone through a standards process, like the ones PDF/X, PDF/A and PDF/E have gone through with the International Standards Organization (ISO). An organization like AIIM leads a working group and submits a specification to an organization like ISO. After review, discussion, voting and multiple rounds of refining of that specification, if it comes to a positive vote, that's when it would become a final, de jure standard.

In addition, there are also mandated standards developed by common-interest groups  government agencies. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) , for example, felt there was a need to standardize the submission of new drug applications. A number of years ago, the FDA mandated the use of PDF for these submissions by pharmaceutical companies, and wrote PDF into a guideline for new drug submissions [PDF: 256 KB]   . Another example is the U.S. Federal Courts [PDF: 352 KB]   system, which accepts PDF-based court submissions." (See chart below).

Government Use of PDF
See larger image
Download [PDF: 19 KB]  

Foss: Regarding PDF/E, explain how and why that particular industry need was identified, what key issues it is designed to address and where things stand in the approval process.

Helander: "PDF/E has been around formally for about a year and a half. The goal was to address some of the issues that come up when engineering documentation  not just drawings, but spreadsheets, text documents and so on  is "bundled" together and exchanged. While PDF is widely used within markets that have a lot of contact with engineering documentation, the problem is similar to what you traditionally find among other PDF users in many industries  a lot of disparate types of content and a lot of PDF creators out there without any guidelines as to how to structure that content appropriately.

PDF for Engineering Documentation
See larger image
Download [PDF: 85 KB]  

PDF/E is really intended to be an exchange format, different from PDF/A in that it's not a final format, but an 'active' one. There are parameters put around the specification to ensure that you have a self-contained document with all the information you need and that the references within it include everything that's required. PDF/E is going through the ISO standards-approval process and is not expected to be final until 2007."

Foss: Explain the typical working group process for the PDF-based standards.

Helander: "Members can come from just about anywhere, can represent companies, industries, government agencies and individual consultants. The reasons for involvement vary across the board, but overall the goal is to establish some level of interoperability.

A like-minded group of people typically first gets together informally to discuss the need for putting together a standard because formal standards development takes a while  typically a three- to five-year process  so you don't enter into it lightly.

The tasks get defined typically within the committee and with the assistance of the standards-development organization. For example, with AIIM, they would say during each step 'these are the things we need to do in order to get to ISO submission and these are the timeframes we're looking at.'

It's always based around a set of industry requirements. With PDF/X, there was a desire to have an easier way to package up and submit very complex graphical design information so it could be printed properly.

Going back to PDF/E, we started by initially looking at the PDF Specification and breaking it into chunks by subject matter that got assigned to different subcommittees comprised of members of the group. It was a very interactive effort. We've used those subcommittees to further discuss the various use cases for PDF/E, what should be included and what should be restricted from the specification.

With PDF/A, government agencies  with the increasing use of electronic processes and the Internet  were having to capture information in a way that was becoming overwhelming. The combination of paper and electronic records was threatening to inundate a lot of these folks. They wanted to establish some guidelines to take that first step in moving from paper to electronic documents for preservation purposes.

PDF for Archiving
See larger image
Download [PDF: 24 KB]  

The group involved a lot of government agencies, as well as the archival community. The considerations aren't just 'can I keep my mortgage documentation for the next 30 years,' it's the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) saying 'our charter is to keep information until the end of the republic.'

Foss: Is there much overlap between the issues explored by the working groups  can one leverage the previous work done by another to expedite the process?

Helander: "All of the separate working groups do reference each other s efforts. Just like software development, standards have various versions. If you look at PDF/X, you have several versions now in the marketplace that reflect time, changes in time and changes in requirements. I expect the same for PDF/A. That working group is already working on version 2, and the same will happen with PDF/E once it gets ratified.

PDF/E started by looking at the PDF specification, the not-yet final PDF/A draft and also added PDF/X draft versions 4 and 5. We did that because a lot of time and effort had gone into the development of those specifications and some of the concerns were very similar, and to keep the PDF-based standards somewhat in sync  making sure none of them contradict each other. 

Foss: How many people get involved with a typical working group?

Helander: "With most working groups, you're looking at from 15 to 30 people who are actively engaged at any given time. There may be hot topics that come up periodically where additional people get involved in the process.

Beyond that, there are the people and companies who monitor the group s mailing list for new developments. A working group s mailing list can have hundreds of subscribers  with PDF/A, it was more than 400. It's also where the various countries get a lot of their information  in the ISO process, you've got all these country organizations participating. So while the working group may be more active in the U.S., it often does comprise international members. The wider international group may not be able to attend all the time, so they use the mailing list as a way to keep track of what's going on and what they need to pay attention to for the next discussion and vote. Periodically every working group gets some questions from their mailing list that prompt further discussion on a particular topic."

Foss: How much ongoing work is there to maintain and update an approved standard, since the PDF specification and related technologies continue to change and evolve?

Helander: "That's exactly why the PDF/A working group is looking at things like dynamic content and 3D content, because the PDF/E working group has addressed that for exchange purposes and now the PDF/A working group needs to address it for archival purposes.

That's a hard one to crack because when you think about the requirements for retention versus those for an exchange format that is a living document, they're very different. If you have a living, actively used document, you probably won't have too many issues with compatible or available players for different kinds of content. But when it comes to file formats and archiving, you might not have access to that media player in a year, much less in 10 or 100 years. How do you deal with that? I don't know that there are any easy answers right now. It's certainly something we see coming up even within the PDF/E working group, along with archiving 3D content.

The working group for PDF/A version 2 has already defined a list of issues, including what they need to do around digital signatures and multimedia. I think one of the biggest points of confusion with PDF/A has been the decision to prohibit encryption. PDF/A files cannot be encrypted. What that means is that when you use a digital signature, typically you're using some form of encryption.

I think people anticipated that PDF/A was going to be the be-all, end-all for their archival requirements. The reality is that it's a file format that is one piece of a preservation process or set of requirements. You have the format, but you also have a whole set of procedures and policies that need to be put into place to accurately capture information for preservation.

Foss: What is the impact of a standard like PDF/A on an industry, on users and for Adobe?

Helander: ""PDF/A helps users in that it's an open standard specifically developed to address the problem of long-term retention of electronic documents. We re seeing the creation of PDF/A tools by a number of companies, including Adobe. Clearly that benefits not only Adobe, but also other PDF developers and users. If you're submitting something to the government and already using PDF, it certainly makes things easier. The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office is an example of that, where lawyers are already using PDF and they really wanted to submit their patent applications in PDF. Now they're able to do so."

Foss: How do the results of the standards process  with PDF/A, for example, which was approved as an international standard in May 2005  get integrated into Acrobat development so that users can easily create and validate PDF files? How much of a time lag typically exists between final approval and the availability of tools that support the standard?

Helander: "The good thing about participating in standards efforts is that you can get some sense of what's coming. You submit the specification pretty far in advance of final approval. There's a fair amount of time for any of the participating companies, agencies and consultants to get a good sense of what the final specification is going to look like, so you can start preparing for what it means to incorporate the specification into your own procedures or products.

Acrobat 7 is a great example of that. When it came out, the PDF/A specification wasn't final, but Adobe wrote a draft version for support out of the Distiller so that you could create PDF/A-1b (for minimal compliance) files. Even though the standard wasn't final, it was a way to allow customers to start experimenting with it and for us to take the first step in supporting it. If you look now at Acrobat 3D, which was released in January 2006, you'll see PDF/A-1b  not the draft version, but the real thing  supported out of its Distiller. Acrobat Professional 7.0.7 now also uses the final PDF/A-1b specification. I expect we'll see PDF/A-1a support at some point in the future."

<< Back to Articles main menu.