Welcome to the homepage of the PDF/A Competence Center, a cooperation between numerous world-leading companies and experts in PDF technology. The aim of the PDF/A Competence Center is to promote the exchange of information and experience in the area of long-term archiving in accordance with ISO 19005: PDF/A.

• Guaranteed Access to Content: PDF/A ensures that documents may be reproduced in the unforeseeable future.
• All Documents Accepted: Electronic or paper source; it doesn’t matter. Almost any document can become a PDF/A document.
• An International Standard: ISO 19005 (PDF/A) is managed by the international community in an open and democratic process.
• Conformance may be Validated: PDF/A conformance imposes stringent technical requirements. A wide variety of vendors produce tools for checking and correcting documents to ensure they meet PDF/A standards.
• Better for Business and the Environment: PDF/A is electronic paper. As such PDF/A enables better document workflows, reduces waste and carbon emissions and improves overall efficiency.

To put it simply - PDF/A is an ISO Standard for using PDF format for the long-term archiving of electronic documents. And what does this actually mean? Read more here...

PDF/A Competence Center experts have prepared several articles providing detailed background knowledge about a diversity of questions dealing with PDF/A. Sample documents are: “PDF/A - a look at the technical side”, “PDF/A for Scanned Documents”, “Improved PDF/A-1b”, and “PDF/A Metadata – XMP, RDF & Dublin Core”. Overview page…

Are there already companies that have begun implementing PDF/A? Do existing archives, e.g. TIFF-based, have to be migrated to PDF/A? What tools are recommended for specific functions and features? Are the existing tools mature enough to be relied on? The supplier of my archiving system doesn’t offer PDF/A support yet – what can I do? These and other questions can be discussed and debated in the PDF/A Competence Center’s Discussion Forum. Register yourself now in the english PDF/A Discussion Forum and exchange ideas and experiences with other users and manufacturers.

Interested parties can contact members of the PDF/A Competence Center groups in the following social networks: LinkedIn and Xing.