A 13 to 1 vote has set the Portable Document Format (PDF) on a course to become ISO 32000 standard.

Five voting countries added a total of 205 comments to the standard, which will have to be resolved to the satisfaction of all countries before the standard is finalised.

The only dissenting country was France, which added 35 comments. However, the US added 125 comments.

James King, principal scientist at Adobe, said in his blog: “It may seem strange that the sponsoring country (US) is the one with the most comments (125) but I think that is a reflection of two things: the US committee contains a lot of knowledgeable people including several from Adobe, and we honestly found some mistakes that we felt must be corrected.

“To me this reflects the honesty with which this group has approached this whole effort. We could have held back to reduce the number but that is not the way this whole effort has been conducted and we are not about to start with any trickery,” he said.

King has been nominated by the US as the technical editor and will be responsible for responding to all comments at the next working group meeting.

Nine countries, including Australia, voted positively without any comment.

The vote is the latest step in a process that was started earlier this year by Adobe.