Adobe is preparing to submit its Portable Document Format (PDF) to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The process will ensure that third-party applications can support PDF documents in the future.
Governments and enterprises increasingly demand such levels of openness from document formats to allow them to access archived materials.
With a closed standard, they would have to rely on Adobe to keep developing and supporting applications that can read and edit older documents.
Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, described the submission of the PDF 1.7 standard as the "next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal de jure standard".
Adobe has worked with the ISO since 1995 to create several subsets of the PDF as open standards, including PDF for Archive and PDF for Exchange.
Other subsets such as PDF for Engineering and PDF for Universal Access are currently under review.
