This was a briefing day on preserving PDF at Oxford University. Presentations include:
- An introduction to PDF, Sarah Higgins, Aberystwyth University
- Portable Document Format (PDF)
- Developed to enable document sharing across platforms while retaining “look and feel”
- Originally a proprietary format - Adobe Systems
- Specification available free of charge from 1993
- Became an open standard in 2008 ISO 32000-1:2008 (PDF 1.7)
- Many flavors, PDF/A, PDF/X, PDF/E, PDF/VT, PDF/UA
- PDF/A is a sub-set for the Long Term Preservation of multi-media page documents that may contain a mixture of text, raster images and vector graphics. Self contained, robust, predictable, no encryption, no interactivity, limited color space
- Flavours of PDF/A: PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2, PDF/A-3 and different levels of conformance
- A Document is not the same as a Record, which is
- Authentic
- Reliable
- Has integrity
- Usable
- Understanding PDF risks in preservation, Johan van der Knijff, National Library of the Netherlands
- Why PDF/A validation matters, even if you don’t have PDF/A
- Identify preservation risks of any PDF by assessing against PDF/A standard with a validator
- PDF: Myths vs facts, Ange Albertini, Corkami
- Graphical fact sheet about PDF. Shows the structure
- Many myths about PDF
- Many possible malformations handled specifically by each reader
- It’s a complex patchwork!
- PDF is very useful, but it has many issues of all kinds to deal with. It is far from perfect.
- What if Adobe stopped supporting PDF (like Flash) and we were just left with the specs?
- Preserving PDF at the coalface, Tim Evans, Archaeology Data Service
- PDF to PDF/A 1B conversions were problematic
- A lot of the PDF problems can be fixed with manual intervention
- Used PDF/A Manager created by PDFTron for batch processing, automated fix-ups, with 80% success rate.
- Still using a mixture of PDFTron and Preflight
- Concern over incoming PDFs checked by DROID showing false positives
- Third party tools: CutePDF, OmniPageCapture SDK, Nitro PDF, PDFCreator, Acrobat PDFMakerfor Word (v.8)
- Currently Practice: Use of PDF/A 1 and PDF/A 2; adopt a best fit of the two.
- Use Callas PDF Toolbox
- Now tied to a mixed economy of softwares and tools (some free, some commercial) to ensure consistent and accurate creation and validation.
- Introducing veraPDF, Carl Wilson, Open Preservation Foundation
- veraPDF is a project, a consortium, and a software product
- Plan to produce a conformance checker
- Keep up with Developments on Github: https://github.com/verapdf
- PDF/A Flyer
- Why PDF/A validation matters, even if you don’t have PDF/A
- Digital Preservation Tools on Github.
- Tabula
- Ensuring long-term access: PDF validation with JHOVE?
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