The Federal Publishers Committee is hard at work developing an archiving version of Adobe's Portable Document Format and hopes to release a draft of the PDF/A standard early next year. Committee member Stephen Levenson says the plan is to have a final standard out by the end of 2005, which will be submitted to the International Organization for Standardization for approval as an international standard. The need for an archiving standard is clear, says Levenson. Because Adobe encourages organizations to use its PDF specifications to create their own software for use with PDF file, that customized software may introduce extra features or functionality that make it impossible for outsiders to access certain segments of a file. PDF/A will codify a stripped-down version of the PDF format that will be platform-neutral. PDF/A will standardize aspects of meta-tagging, color representation and multiple language support, and will also require that all fonts used in a document be embedded in the document itself. Once the PDF/A standard has been approved, the committee hopes that software vendors will incorporate it into their own PDF readers and generators. Levenson says he envisions PDF software that would include the PDF/A as a "save as" option, making it easy for users to create archive-ready documents.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:20 AM
