Add another country to a growing list of countries that adopt truly open standards [1, 2, 3, 4].

The South African government yesterday announced the adoption of OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a standard for government communications.

Elsewhere, Adobe argues in favour of Portable Document Format for archiving (via Andy Updegrove), amid its pursuit for ISO certification.

Archiving is a rather loaded word since doing it can be a widely varying activity. In many situations, archiving PDF files is a very good solution. In fact it was so attractive to some US Government agencies that they encouraged their personnel to work on an ISO committee/working group to define a special subset of PDF called PDF/A that meets their needs better than plain old PDF might.

This is all very fascinating, but there are many patents associated with PDF files. PostScript may seem like a more attractive option, albeit it has fewer features.