It's official. AIIM and NPES announced that ISO has approved PDF/Archive. Once you get past the alphabet soup of organization and format names, there is a lot to be happy about here.
PDF/A will enable organizations to archive documents electronically in a way that will ensure preservation of content over an extended period of time and ensure that those documents can be retrieved and rendered with a consistent and predictable result in the future.
The standards is officially titled ISO 19005-1, Document management - Electronic document file format for long-term preservation - Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1).
An article in Federal Computer Week has this info on the format.
PDF/A specifies a subset of the PDF file format that is more suitable for long-term preservation than the traditional PDF. For example, the standard will forbid links to outside documents and require fonts to be embedded in documents, making the documents completely independent of outside resources, said Diana Helander, Adobe's business development manager for worldwide standards. The documents must include metadata so that archived documents can be fully searchable, auditable and traceable.
The format also prohibits encryption from being used, something that will ensure document accessibility into the future.
Here are some websites with more information:
AIIM PDF/A Standards
Library of Congress Digital Formats
PDF entry in Wikipedia
Posted by Paul H at September 16, 2005 08:59 AM
