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Since 2006, the requirement for using the PDF/A ISO standard as a preferred document format has been increasing in proposals and projects of public authorities and administrations. There are even some national agencies that now explicitly require PDF/A as their standard archiving format. This follows the concept of relying on open standards, instead of company-specific formats which can lead to problems in handling the documents in the future. [...]
nestor – the German Network of Expertise for Digital Preservation
nestor is the German competence network for digital preservation. Its purpose is to bring together the existing know-how and the competencies with regard to digital preservation in Germany. [...]
Website Archiving to PDF/A – Customer Story: UBS
UBS AG is implementing a ground-breaking project together with PDF Tools AG for archiving business-critical web pages in a manner compliant with auditing requirements. The result: enhanced security for documentation and review of communications contents. And the corporate archivist is very happy.
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Session Intro – Track A: Archives and Libraries
The articles in this chapter contain the content of the Conference Track A: Archives & Libraries. For archives and libraries, “long-term archiving” virtually means “forever”! Special measures are required for both hardware and software, and PDF/A can fulfil many of the requirements for software and file formats. [...]
Optimising PDF/A Documents for Large Archives
Nowadays, activities between enterprises and end-users are collectively referred to as B2C (Business to Consumer). This class of business, also commonly known as e-business, typically involves a high volume of communication in the form of offers, invoices, order confirmation, performance reports, policies or bank statements. While the volume of individual, physical documents (in the vernacular – letters) continues to fall in almost all countries, the percentage of electronic documents distributed as e-mail or via web portals increases disproportionately. When these documents have to be facsimiles of the original paper form there is no getting around PDF and as a consequence PDF/A. [...]
Accessibility in PDF and Elsewhere
We often forget that a significant percentage of all printed pages produced every year are not books, manuals, newspapers and other such documents. The bulk of printed output are the insurance policies, bank statements, telephone bills, invoices, statements and other documents that are sent to our homes. The quantity of these documents produced annually number in the hundreds of billions of pages. In the United States alone, over 80 billion transactional mail pieces are sent annually, each including multiple pages. [...]
Archiving E-mails with PDF/A
The legal requirements for archiving business documents are increasing the need to also archive e-mail correspondence. This raises the question of which archiving format is most suited for the long-term archiving of e-mails. The PDF/A-1 standard also opens up new possibilities for using a uniform long-term format that contains the document character of an e-mail, can be searched for full text and, at the same time, can contain important metadata. A concept for converting e-mails to PDF/A documents is introduced and particular attention is paid to the process of handling file attachments. [...]
Reproducibility of Archived Documents
Documents must be archived. Electronic archiving has become a universally recognized and practical method of digitally maintaining information. The formats that are used vary from simple raster formats (BMP, PNG and so on) to formats that have complex structures (MO:DCA, AFP) and also include PDF and PDF/A. As the complexity of the individual formats increases, the requirements for the structure and completeness of the documents must be adjusted accordingly and realized consistently. The aim is to ensure that you can reproduce these documents even after a long time. It only becomes clear at the time of the reproduction whether the criteria for a successful reproduction were also consistently implemented and realized. [...]
PDF/A-2 – Technical Overview
The Portable Document Format – developed by Adobe Systems and first published in 1993 – offers a series of beneficial and hitherto unavailable characteristics. In addition to platform independence, this includes reliable rendering of page oriented contents. All components of a file such as fonts, texts, images and graphics are included in the PDF file itself. These advantages made PDF a candidate for standardization for selected usage areas and industries. What all standards have in common is that, as subsets, they restrict the extensive features of PDF and, in this way, optimise it for special application options. [...]
Italian IT network CGN enables 20,000 Professionals to Submit PDF/A-Deeds
Final balance sheets, constitutional deeds, changes and operations on company shares, business transfers, modifications to company agreements, acquisitions, mergers, dissolutions and cancellations: the common denominator to all the annexes delivered to the Companies’ Register is PDF/A format. [...]
