PDF/A-2 – Technical Overview

Olaf Drümmer | October 1, 2010

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. [...]

Life Without Metadata?

Frank Biederich | July 1, 2009

What does it mean – “without metadata”? Metadata is everywhere. We have to deal with it each and every day; sometimes it’s critical for us – sometimes it’s in our way. Although metadata is so ubiquitous the term itself has no broad awareness in our society. Ask your friends what metadata is all about and if they are not IT specialists you might not get an answer. But you’ll find metadata on every milk bottle, every pharmaceutical product and on the passport in your wallet. But what would happen if there would be no metadata at all? [...]

PDF/A for Digital-Born Documents – Archiving MS-Office Documents, E-Mails and Websites

Hans Bärfuss | July 1, 2009

When compared with the preservation of data in its original format, there are many advantages to archiving documents and data from digital sources into PDF/A. The source applications are rapidly being developed further. As a result of this, after only a few years, the readability and the authentic display of data can no longer be guaranteed. Furthermore, a company must maintain all of the applications that are used and all of the platforms on which they operate. This incurs considerable costs. Even for documents and files that are created digitally, PDF/A is an excellent choice for long-term archiving and comes with great advantages with regard to uniformity, searchability and cost-effectiveness.
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Session Intro – Track 1: What You Need to Know About PDF/A

Thomas Zellmann | July 1, 2009

The articles in this chapter contain the conference presentations from Track 1: What you need to know about PDF/A, for novice to intermediate level users. [...]

XMP Metadata in PDF/A – Metadata and the XMP Format

Thomas Merz | July 1, 2009

Metadata is data about data: the author of a document, the date when an image was taken or the type of camera used for a snapshot – these are familiar examples of metadata items. Metadata handling is an integral part of modern applications in areas such as image handling, office documents, desktop and technical publishing, and many others. HTML also supports metadata for Web documents. [...]

Session Intro – Track 3: Metadata – Data about PDF/A Data

Olaf Drümmer | July 1, 2009

When around 2002 the committee that created the PDF/A standard decided to rely on XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform) for the inclusion of metadata in PDF/A [...]