Το υπό ανάπτυξη πρότυπο PDF/A : Ανακαλύπτοντας τα οφέλη της τεχνολογίας PDF στην αρχειοθέτηση εγγράφων

摘要

A new joint activity has been initiated to develop an international standard that defines the use of the Portable Document Format (PDF) for archiving and preserving documents. The project, currently referred to as PDF/A, will address the growing need to electronically archive documents that may contain a mixture of text, raster images and vector graphics.Many people confuse PDF, the data format, with Adobe Acrobat, the software suite that Adobe sells to create, view and enhance PDF documents. We shall clarify that PDF is a publicly available specification and will show how Adobe encourages third-parties to further develop solutions outside of the Acrobat product family. We intend to present the history of PDF and identify PDF as a de facto standard for managing and archiving of all types of documents and forms.We present the PDF as an effective framework for establishing and maintaining a reliable, accessible, and secure digital archive. We describe the main characteristics of a PDF document; it consists of a sequence of pages, with each page including the text, font specifications, margins, layout, graphical elements, and background and text colours. It can also include other items such as metadata, hyperlinks, and form fields. Dublin Core metadata elements can be contained within PDF files. With all this information present the PDF file can be imaged accurately for the screen and the printing device. PDF files can also be secured with password protection and encryption.This paper also identifies the requirements for electronic archives, as well as the role of metadata in this field, and how PDF can be used as an archiving format for legacy paper documents and all types of digital content (including voice, images and video). Document acquisition and conversion guidelines will be provided.