Coming in 2005: international PDF-archive standard.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: News, Trends & Analysis

PDF-Archive (PDF-A) could become an international standard by early next year.

The open-standard PDF, created by Adobe Systems, has become a widely used format for distributing documents on the Internet because it preserves their original look and makes copying and editing them difficult. The PDF standard is popular with governments for archiving electronic documents but is not suitable for archiving permanent records. For that, federal agencies expect to use the new modified version, PDF-A.

The PDF-A standard will be a slimmed-down version of PDF 1.4, a version of the published, freely available PDF specification, and will be useful for formatting document files that contain multiple pages of text, raster images, or vector graphics. Unlike PDF, PDF-A will contain type fonts to ensure that electronic documents will look the same in the future as they did when they were created. The standard will not be suitable for archiving music and video files, according to members of the PDF-A Committee, which includes representatives from Eastman Kodak, IBM, Xerox, the Internal Revenue Service, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration. However, it will be extremely useful for archiving large volumes of electronic documents.

Among federal...