The European Union is standardising on the PADeS - Advanced Electronic Signatures for Portable Document Format (PDF) - for all secure paperless business transactions done in the EU. While this is quite interesting, I have a problem with establishing PDF as an information standard. PDF is a layout mechanism - which means it defines how things look on the screen - rather than a content based mechanism. It is quite hard to parse data from within PDF in a predictable manner. According to a press release by Adobe itself, ePub is a XML based format that looks reasonably good on a variety of screens (including mobile screens) , is machine readable and has various encryption schemes built in.

Though the EU standard does define XAdES - XML Advanced Electronic Signatures - it is hardly practical, since XML (in its native form) is not human readable. What would have been best would be a hybrid format that defines layout (for human readability), as well as digital content (for machine readability).

This makes it extremely hard to justify standardising on PDF rather than ePub. In India, we are yet to define a paperless standard of our own - when we do so, I hope we take this into account.