If you didn't know it already, Adobe Acrobat's PDF format has conquered the world.

The PDF (portable document format) is one of the best means of passing documents around the Internet via e-mail or for download.

It's easy to read with Adobe's free reader, easy to download, ready to print and unlike Word documents, cannot be easily changed or amended. In other words PDF is a digital format for representing documents.

It has become the standard for the exchange and storage of data because of a users' ability to significantly compress complex document files.

PDF files may be created natively in PDF form, converted from other electronic formats, or digitised from paper, microform or other hard copy format.

Now ISO, the world standards setting body, has issued a new set of criteria for long-life PDF documents.

The new ISO standard requires the files must remain useable and accessible across multiple generations of technology.

Why is this useful? It is establishing the PDF as the standard for organisational record-keeping, libraries, databases and archives.

This gives organisations the confidence to convert from other electronic formats, or digitilise information from paper, microform or other hard copy format.

ISO-approved PDF (called PDF/A) files will be more self-contained, self-describing, device-independent than generic PDF 1.4 files and should allow information to be retained longer in the format.

Here's another statistic for number crunchers. The ISO estimates that the total size of the public Web is 167 terabytes.

One terabyte is equivalent to the size of a large public library. Of that 9.2 per cent of the storage space is taken up by PDF documents.

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Is METman the type of animated, automated TV broadcaster we will be watching in a few years time? UK-based Televirtual Media Laboratory is calling its artificial speech engine and animated figure "TV's first synthetic broadcaster". The company worked to produce the system with speech scientists and the BBC's weather graphic suppliers.

Still under development, METman is being designed to explore and interpret the latest three-dimensional weather maps. In the final application, raw facts and figures will be fed into the system, which automatically draws from a lexicon of appropriate phrases, to produce a narrative report. This text is then fed into METvoice the first ever artificial voice or text-to-speech engine, to be custom-built to broadcast standards. Currently the computurised figure and voice is generated automatically after it is fed a few lines of text-based data issued as a meteorological summary and accompanied by a weather map update.

The language stream in turn triggers lip-synch animations and METman's moods, expressions, gestures and screen positions.

The low-cost weather reporting service will be aimed at regional and niche TV channels.

Televirtual believes gaming channels and quiz TV variants could also employ METman like figures as virtual presenters in virtual sets, at a fraction of the cost of conventional presentation methods.

"Installed in domestic television set top boxes (STBs), 3d 'announcers' will be able to present a personalised information service tailored to individual requirements," the company states.

Televirtual says the animations would be able to advise on TV viewing schedules, read the news and weather on demand, and trawl the Internet on request.

Visions of Clippy, Microsoft's hated animated helper,cross my mind. Watch it all at Televirtual