PDF/A might still be a new concept to a lot of people, but ISO ratified and published the electronic document archiving standard nearly four years ago, and a whole industry—including more than 100 software vendors—has sprung up around it as government, education, and corporate entities standardize on PDF/A to store their documents.
In some markets, using PDF/A isn't just a best practice; it's the law. Around the world, says longtime PDF/A champion Leonard Rosenthol—hired by Adobe as PDF Standards Architect in 2006, after ISO ratified PDF/A—several governments have legislated PDF/A's use.
"Clearly, there is huge support from the industry," Rosenthol says. "It has been adopted by a standard by numerous governments around the world: Belgium, UK, Australia, Korea, Brazil, Uruguay...the list goes on."
In the United States, using PDF/A is typically a best-practice, de facto standard. More and more state, local, and national government entities are using it, however, such as the state of New York, which is in the process of making it the official format for archiving state documents.
Public companies who must keep track of emails and other digital documents because of laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley might not be compelled by the law to use PDF/A, but many decision makers are finding PDF/A a logical choice for that part of their compliance efforts.
On June 17–19, PDF/A gurus from around the world--including Rosenthol--will gather in Berlin at the 3rd International PDF/A Conference. Rosenthol says the top issue is something under the hood of most PDFs but is key or organizing massive document archives: Metadata. Not just how to use it, but how to think about it in a consistent, logical manner to keep documents accessible and usable over the long haul.
Rosenthol will deliver a keynote on a new standard under development, PDF/A-2, which catches up to new features in PDF since the first PDF/A came about, such as JPEG 2000 document compression and rransparency. PDF/A, like its PDF/X cousin for prepress, is basically a greatly reduced, barebones version of standard PDF.
Adding bells and whistles to a PDF increases its complication, therefore potentially limiting users' ability to open files decades from now. PDF/A-2, Rosenthol hopes, will resolve these issues and be published late 2009 or early 2010 if everything goes as planned.
Even beyond adding those features to the spec, Rosenthol says, PDF/A-2 moves the electronic archiving standard more into public control and away from Adobe. PDF/A originally was standardized on PDF 1.4, the spec Adobe shipped with Acrobat 5. PDF/A-2 will bring it up to the more recent PDF 1.7 spec, itself ratified as ISO 32000.
"ISO 32000 is an ISO version of PDF, so we're bringing PDF/A up to ISO 32000," Rosenthol says. "It will be a pure ISO standard, where the current version refers to an Adobe standard."
Way off on the horizon, Rosenthol says, is a potential third version of PDF/A that may attempt to sort out the sticky business of archiving rich media: 3-D graphics, sound and video. While PDF/A-3 is currently tabled, Rosenthol says the PDF/A standards committee will likely restart discussion in the coming months. Think that sounds like a snoozer? Think again--they have their work cut out for them, reconciling the wants and needs of the average PDF user versus the long-term storage concerns of more technologically conservative archivists.
"Archivists have historically had issues with media," Rosenthol says. "For example, if you are producing a video documentary on President Obama and you wanted it stored in the National Archives, [you couldn't]. They will not accept digital video right now because their people have not yet agreed on a standard for digital video. We've been waiting for the archivists to catch up, and they're getting to the point where they're starting to accept digital content...now we can mirror that, or at least consider how it's applied to PDF."
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