At the end of January 2007, Adobe submitted its Portable Document Format (PDF) to the ISO. Now, as the year winds to a close, Adobe has announced that PDF 1.7 has been approved by the ISO and will become the ISO 32000 standard (DIS). According to a blog post by Adobe PDF architect and senior principal scientist Jim King, the standard was approved by a vote of 13:1, with one country (Russia) abstaining and one country (France) voting against.

On January 21, King will present responses to the 205 comments made by the voting nations, including the 125 comments made by the United States and the 37 comments made by the French. If all comments are satisfactorily addressed during the January 21-23 time period, the revised standard will be published afterwards. If comments remain to be addressed after this meeting, the standard will enter a two-month voting period on the Final Draft International Standard or FDIS. The question of what the French don't like about PDF and what comments they submitted was raised by readers multiple times in response to King's post. Sadly, King has no answers, and I wasn't able to turn anything up, either.