Adocument file format is a textorbinary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers.
There currently exist a multitude of incompatible document file formats.
In 1993, the ITU-T tried to establish a standard for document file formats, known as the Open Document Architecture (ODA) which was supposed to replace all competing document file formats. It is described in ITU-T documents T.411 through T.421, which are equivalent to ISO 8613. It did not succeed.
Page description languages such as PostScript and PDF have become the de facto standard for documents that a typical user should only be able to create and read, not edit. In 2001, a series of ISO/IEC standards for PDF began to be published, including the specification for PDF itself, ISO-32000.
HTML is the most used and open international standard and it is also used as document file format. It has also become ISO/IEC standard (ISO 15445:2000).
The default binary file format used by Microsoft Word (.doc) has become widespread de facto standard for office documents, but it is a proprietary format and is not always fully supported by other word processors.
ASCII, UTF-8 — plain text encodings. With these two character sets, there are three different line endings used: (a) LF -- linefeed, by UNIX and like systems, (b) CRLF -- carriage return, linefeed by DOS and Windows systems, and (c) CR -- carriage return by older Macintosh systems.
PDF — Open standard for document exchange. ISO standards include PDF/X (eXchange), PDF/A (Archive), PDF/E (Engineering), ISO 32000 (PDF), PDF/UA (Accessibility) and PDF/VT (Variable data and transactional printing). PDF is readable on almost every platform with free or open source readers. Open source PDF creators are also available.
