comparison of PDF (and other files) web services: converters, editors and viewers; Standardization (ISO) and Document management system: Portable Document Format.

*.PDF = ISO 32000


---1---Standardization
Many industry associations publish their own lists of particular document control standards.
Following is a list of some of the relevant ISO documents. Divisions ICS 01.140.10 and 01.140.20.
The ISO has also published a series of standards regarding the technical documentation, covered by the division of 01.110.
ISO 2709 Information and documentation — Format for information exchange
ISO 15836 Information and documentation — The Dublin Core metadata element set
ISO 15489 Information and documentation — Records management
ISO 21127 Information and documentation — A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information
ISO 23950 Information and documentation — Information retrieval (Z39.50) — Application service definition and protocol specification
ISO 10244 Document management — Business process baselining and analysis
ISO 32000 Document management — Portable document format

• International Organization for Standardization. "01.140.10: Writing and transliteration". Retrieved 14 July 2008.
• International Organization for Standardization. "01.140.20: Information sciences". Retrieved 14 July 2008.
• International Organization for Standardization. "01.110: Technical product documentation". Retrieved 15 July 2008.

Document management system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

----------The PDF combines 3 technologies:

1. A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics.
2. A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.
3. A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file (with data compression where appropriate).

-----2----brief history

PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008

http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/warnock_camelot.pdf

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/05/pdf-approved-iso-32000

The ISO 32000-1 allows use of some specifications, which are not standardized e.g. Adobe XML Forms Architecture:

@2010: http://gnupdf.org/Forms_Data_Format

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_32000

------3----- Web services 

Converters

• http://www.cometdocs.com/
  wikipedia: Cometdocs: online PDF conversion, online file converter
  alexa: 120 000 (@july 2011)
• http://www.zamzar.com/
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamzar: online file converter (>100 file formats; also WebP).
  alexa: 7000 (@july 2011)
• ------
• Software602 Print2PDF 9.0: offline products and interactive web conversion from IIS or XML-SOAP web service; http://www.software602.com/products

Editors

• http://www.pdfescape.com/
  PDFescape: a free web service to view, create forms, fill out forms, and edit PDF documents from a web browser (requires JavaScript to be enabled). PDFescape is a free of charge web-based PDF editor program written in JavaScript, HTML, CSS and ASP.
  alexa: 27 000 (@july 2011)
• https://docq.com/landing/pdfvue
  PDFVue: a free web application that allows the user to view PDF's, comment and fill PDF forms from a web browser. Generates a watermark. It's also a converter.
  alexa: 717 000 (@july 2011)
• -------
• Qoppa PDF Libraries: Java beans for viewing and annotating PDF files to be integrated in an applet. The commercial Qoppa PDF libraries are a suite of Java class libraries and Java bean components developed by Qoppa Software; also Android platform.

Viewers

• http://a.nnotate.com/php/home.php
  A.nnotate - a web service which views PDF documents as HTML in the browser, with annotation features.
  The basic service is free: just register and you can upload 30 new pages a month and make unlimited notes. Your free account includes private web space for:Uploading documents, including PDF, DOC, DOCX, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Spreadsheets.Uploading images (PNG, GIF and JPEG)Making private snapshots of web pagesAttaching notes to documents and imagesSharing documents and notes:OpenJason includes it in their list of 44 excellent productivity tools http://www.openjason.com/2008/07/28/44-excellent-productivity-tools/
  alexa : 440 000 (@july 2011)
• http://crocodoc.com/
  Crocodoc - a free web service which allows annotating PDFs and saving them
  Crocodoc's API is free for non-commercial use.
  alexa :144 000 (@july 2011)
• http://www.digisigner.com/products.html
  DigiSigner - you must download;  free online PDF viewer java applet with additional function to digitally sign PDF documents; free Third Party Libraries.
  alexa:  >2 000 000  (@july 2011)
• Docstoc - a web service which allows viewing/embedding documents (Docstoc Viewer) and file hosting services. It support these file types: Adobe PDF (.pdf), MS Word (.doc, .docx), MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx), MS Powerpoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Plain Text (.txt)alexa: 926 (@july 2011)
• docs.google.com
  Google Docs: the well-known web service. For PDF file: it views PDF documents as JPEG images in the browser;Google Docs also allows for uploading, and saving to the Portable Document Format. PDF files can be viewed but not edited!!!
  It's a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, slide show, form, and data storage service offered by Google: 1GB of free space. Documents can be saved to a user's local computer in a variety of formats including: (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Office). The application supports two ISO standard document formats: OpenDocument (for both opening and exporting) and Office Open XML (for opening only). Individual documents may not exceed 1GB (@January 2010), embedded images must not exceed 2MB each, and spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, and 99 sheets. In September 2009, an equation editor was added which allows rendering in LaTeX format. However, Google Docs lacks an equation numbering feature.
  Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites also incorporate Google Apps Script to write code within documents in a similar way to VBA in Microsoft Office. The scripts can be activated either by user action or by a trigger in response to an event (http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/10/google-apps-scripts.php).
  The Android Google Docs app can also take a photo of a document, sign, or other text and use Optical Character Recognition to convert to text that can be edited:
  http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/04/introducing-new-google-docs-app-for.html
  off-line access:  the Google Docs Blog announced that offline access would be returning in 2011 with the use of HTML5:
  http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-on-google-docs-offline-and-new.html
  http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/offline-gmail/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
  Check out the latest new features: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html
  off-line acces with: www.syncplicity.com
  Document statistics: Ever wonder if people are actually looking at the document you’ve shared? Wonder no longer. By clicking the Discussions button and then the Document stats link, you can now see the 7-day activity of your doc.
• http://www.scribd.com/; http://www.scribd.com/html5
  Scribd: a web service which renders PDF documents as HTML5 in the browser. It's a Web 2.0 based document-sharing website which allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format.
  Upload Multiple Doc online and with a desktop uploader (only mac OSX).
  alexa: 196 (@july 2011)
• http://www.vuzit.com/
  vuzit: a web service which views PDF documents (and 40 others) as HTML5 in the browser via AJAX. The Vuzit Viewer is free for limited use.
  alexa: 400 000 (@july 2011)

and desktop acrobat reader...