There are some things in life that can always be taken for granted. Bruce Willis will lose his shirt at some point in a film. Jean-Claud Van Damme will show his naked backside. Imaginary telephone numbers always start with ‘555′. The minimum specifications for Vista will increase as the delivery date slips further into the 21st Century. Steve Jobs will wear a black polo-necked shirt and jeans when he delivers the keynote speech at MacExpo.

Thank goodness Adobe introduced their portable document format to the world as far back as the early 1990’s. In those days the web was something you bumped into in the shed so it mattered little that the first PDF format lacked support for external hyperlinks. It was also competing with well-established competitors including Adobe’s own PostScript file format. Original PDF creation tools as well as viewers cost money so it was slow to catch on. Eventually Adobe started to distribute the free Acrobat Reader software, the competition died out – largely due to not being cross platform, and PDF’s became the standard.

Over the years, Adobe have worked on the PDF format adding features, java script, inter-activity, multi-media and lately, 3D. It remains device and resolution independent and can include all the elements to make an exact copy of a 2D or embedded 3D document. In addition Adobe have released it as an open standard, licensed on a royalty-free basis and created subsets of PDFs standardised under the ISO banner (International Organisation for Standardisation) including: PDF/X for print and graphics, PDF/A for archiving, PDF/E for engineering drawings and PDF/UA for universally accessible PDF files.

The latter, PDF/UA, means it is now possible to create documents that are completely accessible for people with disabilities. PDFs do this by including XML tags, audio descriptions and other features that enable devices such as screen readers to read the documents out loud. Visually challenged users can zoom into documents which reflow the text automatically to take this into account.

In the printing and publishing industry, PDFs have changed the way we work completely. The days of paper proofs have all-but disappeared as PDFs are sent via email. It used to be that the only way to get absolutely guaranteed output was by creating enormous PostScript files of whole documents. This was instead of sending an application’s native documents complete with graphics and such like, hoping the imaging bureau had the right typefaces and colour profiles installed. Nowadays we use high resolution PDFs, containing crop marks, transparency, bleeds, fonts, images and all that made the document in the first place. All wrapped into one document which even has some editability in Adobe Acrobat Pro or can be viewed and printed from a free Acrobat Reader.

So why then do Microsoft want to muscle into this highly efficient way of working with their proposed XML Paper Specification to run under Vista? Microsoft Word can already export PDF files, albeit with some problems – but then that’s because it’s such a dog that everything you try to do in Word is difficult. Microsoft’s usual Three E approach is likely to ruin an efficient and working system by Embracing, Extending and Exterminating, except in this case they are doing it with their own piece of software and Word.

This is, hopefully, where Microsoft’s entry into the arena will wither and die. Adobe have nurtured the PDF over years, it is available for all major computer platforms and ‘just works’. As governments and organisations are abandoning Microsoft’s office in lieu of open source alternatives, it may be too late for XML Paper to catch on.

I can always live in hope.