A question I get asked quite a bit is “how will I know that these scanned documents will still be readable in the future?”
It is a legitimate question – I’m sure many of you have a box of 3.5" floppy disks with WordPerfect files on them somewhere.
There are some files where we don’t care if we have them long term (my son’s soccer schedule from last fall, for example) but there are some we would ideally like to have accessible forever.
The standards group behind the PDF format recognizes this, and they have drafted ISO 19005–1:2005, in other words, the PDF/A format.[1]
The goal was to address the growing need to electronically archive documents in a way that will ensure preservation of their contents over an extended period of time, and will further ensure that those documents will be able to be retrieved and rendered with a consistent and predictable result in the future. This need exists in a growing number of international government and industry segments, including legal systems, libraries, newspapers, regulated industries, and others.
This interesting forum thread led me to this document: PDF/A in a Nutshell, which is a great summary of what PDF/A is, what can, must, and can not be included in a PDF/A document (for example, fonts must be embedded, while audio and video are forbidden), what some of the drawbacks are, and how to create PDF/A documents using some software packages.
Over the next few weeks I will be doing some posts on how to create PDF/A documents on Mac and Windows, but for now, give the Nutshell document a read if you are interested in PDF/A.
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I’ll bet you didn’t know there were a bunch of different kinds of PDFs, did you? ↩
