Already the de facto standard for cross-platform document exchange, it is now officially the standard. Adobe has received ISO approval for PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) being the new electronic document standard, ISO 32000 (DIS).
Adobe's James King noted that the PDF specification passed the ISO approval process with a 13-to-1 vote. PDF 1.7 needed at least 66.6 percent of the votes to be positive, and easily beat the requirement with 93 percent.
For companies and governments worldwide this approval opens the door for easily assuring that documents are accessible on the majority of computer platforms regardless of the application used to created the document. However, (sorry to pro-Microsoft fans), this approval is likely strike a heavy blow to Microsoft's efforts to push its own proprietary electronic document effort.