During the AIIM on Demand Expo, industry leaders discuss file conversion, digital signatures, JPEG compression and other issues.PHILADELPHIA—Eschewing the traditional slide dog-and-pony show, leaders in the PDF Archiving industry opened their session at the AIIM On Demand Conference and Expo, "PDF PDQ: The Fast Track to Developing an Archiving Standard," with a lively discussion with the audience on the future of preserving the valuable documents of their companies and government agencies.
Panelists included moderator Dan Lucarini, the senior director of marketing at Captaris Inc.; Bette Fugitt, chief of records management, applications unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation; Steven Levenson, special assistant and chief technology officer, U.S. District Courts; and Diana Helander, business development manager, World Standards, Adobe Systems Inc.
At issue was how PDF/A, a subset of Adobe PDF version 1.4 designed to be amenable to long-term preservation of page-oriented documents, would deal with ASCII text and TIFF in terms of content archiving format standards.
The AIIM PDF/A Consortium has been at work since 2002 researching and developing these standards for ISO approval, with the final ballot due May 23.
After a brief introduction of panelists, the first hand rose in the audience—"How do you get from a PDF scan document or PDF normal to a PDF/A?"—and the discussion was off and running.
"All of the major PDF producers in the world have laid out plans of what they're going to do," explained Levenson, who is also the Chairman of the ISO Standards Committee. "It won't be: create PDF, and then create a PDF/A. It will just be create PDF/A."
PDF/A will likely be an option within PDF version 1.4, a "save as Archive" function that will allow people to ensure, among other things, that their fonts will be collected at time of creation. (Currently Acrobat 7 already has a draft PDF/A format.)
"Twenty-five years from when Windows doesn't exist, someone is going to have to go back and render the document," said Levenson.
PDF/A will ensure the safety of those fonts. There will also be no JavaScript functionality, so there will be no opportunity to delete anything within the document.
Fugitt and Levenson then explained some reasons for the need for PDF/A.
Speaking from a business perspective, Fugitt detailed the time and cost consumption issues that walk hand in hand with repeated migrations of documents, and that in the current state of archiving, there's no guarantee of accuracy.
"You're talking about a little more lunch money every time you're talking about another migration," she said. PDF/A would create a one-step process of migration.
Levenson focused on accuracy issues. In his industry—the U.S. Court System—accuracy is crucial: His client list is the American public. Their archives demand absolute reproduction, he explained.
"We have complete intolerance to error rates in order to carry out our mission," Levenson said. And within his subset of clients, lawyers, a lot of work is carried out in mixed environments. The ability to transfer file formats amongst them was key. The U.S. Court System's initial adoption of PDF was "our Rosetta Stone," he said. "It allowed us a common language."
An audience member then asked why PDF was chosen versus some other compressed smaller format, such as TIFF.
"The proliferation of PDF writers is one of those answers," said Levenson. He also cited PDF's searchability and pagination features. Fugitt added that PDF/A will maintain font formatting, such as underlining and bolding, important aesthetics to understanding the full meaning of a document.
Helander said, "There will be subsequent versions of the PDF/A standards that will be based on future versions of PDF."
She offered the tantalizing proposition that future versions may be expanded to capture other dynamic forms of media, such as video.
Audience members then delved into the nitty-gritty: Can PDF/A carry the electronic signature?
"Do not expect robust electronic signatures in the first version of this," Levenson said. "It is not included."
If electronic signatures are crucial to a historical document, he suggested the user wait for a year before using PDF/A.
"PDF/A is actually part one," he said. "It's intended to move."
Helander explained, "It's a very strict subset of the reference."
She then detailed two other limitations: no encryption and no external inks.
And does PDF/A incorporate JPEG 2000 compression?
Levenson stated that they hoped to address it for the next version.
"We have to put the fast track on two key issues: digital signatures and JPEG compression."
And finally, one audience member asked, "Will there be a shorter turnaround time for future ISO standard developments?"
Levenson acknowledged it was a frustration, but said he hoped the next version would come much more quickly.
In general, audience members seemed optimistic about the future of PDF archiving, but still wary.
"I think PDF/A is going to be very useful when it's fully implemented when it comes to compression for server space, for migrations issues. So it's a step. But I don't think it's the right time to jump into that format till those standards are completely developed," said Nick Doyle, a Digital Systems Specialist with the Government Printing Office.
Document Management 
