The first draft of an international standard that defines the use of PDF
submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for
review.
The push for a PDF archiving standard, commonly known as PDF/A, is aimed at creating a uniform
way to electronically archive documents to ensure preservation of online
content over an extended period of time.
The draft standard was submitted by a working group set up by the
Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting
Technologies (NPES) and the Association for Information and Image
Management, International (AIIM International).
A spokesperson for the association told internetnews.com ISO
approval would be clear the way for PDF/A to be used by governments,
libraries, newspapers and regulated industries for data archiving. It would
especially be useful for legal systems and industry segments that are data
sensitive and need to preserve documents for a long period of time.
The draft standard also targets the need for documents to be retrieved
and rendered with a consistent and predictable result in the future, the
spokesperson explained.
The proposal sent to the ISO addresses the use of PDF for multi-page
documents that may contain a mixture of text, raster images, and vector
graphics. It also deals with the features and requirements supported by
reading devices that are used to retrieve and render the archived documents.
PDF, short for Portable Document Format, is a file format developed by
Adobe to captures formatting information from a variety
of desktop publishing applications. The PDF format is widely used in the
publishing industry, primarily because it lets formatted documents appear
exactly as created.