Monday, July 2, 2007

PDF rival draws interest

Standards body Ecma International has formed a technical committee to develop <A HREF="http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133644-pg,1/article.html">a standard built on Microsoft's XML Paper Specification,</A> a rival file format to Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format.

According to Ecma's Web site, the goal of the TC46-XPS Technical Committee is to create "a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format and XML-based page description language which is consistent with existing implementations of the format called the XML Paper Specification."

XPS is one of many file formats natively supported in Microsoft's Office 2007 productivity suite and was developed internally by the company. Currently, Microsoft has the only implementation of XPS. Microsoft had planned to include PDF--used widely as a de facto document standard for years but only submitted to a standards body earlier this year by Adobe--as a native file format as well, but Adobe put the kibosh on that plan. Microsoft does offer PDF as an add-on file format for Office.

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