The veraPDF project, definitive, open source PDF/A validation.

Collection of arguably useful shell scripts. Contribute to reitzig/scripts development by creating an account on GitHub.

The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, […]

A blog about Digital Preservation, digital curation, long term access.

In recent years the Portable Document Format (PDF) has become a ubiquitous format in the exchange of documents; in 2005 the PDF/A profile was defined in order to meet long term accessibility needs, and has accordingly come to be regarded as a long-term archiving strategy for PDF files. In the field of archaeology, a growing number of PDF files – containing the detailed results of fieldwork and research – are beginning to be deposited with digital archives such as the Archaeology Data Service (ADS). In the ADS’ experience, the use of PDF/A has had benefits as well as drawbacks: the majority of PDF reports are now in a standard format better suited to longer-term access, however migrating to PDF/A and managing and ensuring reuse of these files is intensive, and fraught with potential pitfalls. Of these, perhaps the most serious has been an unreliability in PDF/A conformance by the wide range of tools and software now available. There are also practical and more theoretical implications for reuse which, as our discipline of archaeology alongside so many others rapidly becomes digitized, presents us with a large corpus of ‘data’ that is human readable, but may not be amenable to machine-based technologies such as NLP. It may be argued that these factors effectively undermine some of the perceived cost benefit of moving from paper to digital, as well as the longer-term sustainability of PDF/A within digital archives.

A first step toward building a visual index for books automatically

Introduction We have already seen that the default assumption in Linux and UNIX is that everything is a file, ideally one that consists of human- and machine-readable text. As a result, we have a v…

Web Design and Company is a St Louis SEO Company, that provides St Louis SEO Services, St Louis Internet Marketing, St Louis Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Adwords Management, and Social Media Marketing for local and nationwide business''

Embedding random files in random formats in a PDF is potentially problematic for preservation. WHOODATHUNKIT.

We’re lucky in the digital stewardship community that our challenges tend to be non life-threatening. Still, when we get fired up about something there is guaranteed to be spirited debate and passionate advocacy on all sides. Such was the case with the release of the PDF/A-3 file format specification in October 2012. We wrote about […]

Why PDF sucks.

The most important new feature of the recently released PDF/A-3 standard is that, unlike PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-1, it allows you to embed any file you...

PDF Cabinet of Horrors: PDFs containing preservationally undesirable "features."

I often go on about how software applications often diverge from, or uniquely implement, documented standards for formatting files that they create. Some software vendors are aware of, and document these deviations. Adobe are a good example of this with their software and in particular their implementation of extensions in writing files that adhere to the PDF version 1.7 formatting standard. Below is an extract from the wikipedia entry on PDF with my emphasis in italics at the bottom:   “Adobe’s PDF specifications    Adobe changed the PDF specification several times and continues to develop new specifications with new versions of Adobe Acrobat. There have been nine versions of PDF with corresponding Acrobat releases:[10]      (1993) – PDF 1.0 / Acrobat 1.0    (1994) – PDF 1.1 / Acrobat 2.0    (1996) – PDF 1.2 / Acrobat 3.0    (1999) – PDF 1.3 / Acrobat 4.0    (2001) – PDF 1.4 / Acrobat 5.0    (2003) – PDF 1.5 / Acrobat 6.0    (2005) – PDF 1.6 / Acrobat 7.0    (2006) – PDF 1.7 / Acrobat 8.0    (2008) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 3 / Acrobat 9.0    (2009) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 5 / Acrobat 9.1     The ISO standard ISO 32000-1:2008 is equivalent to Adobe’s PDF 1.7. Adobe declared that it is not producing a PDF 1.8 Reference. The future versions of the PDF Specification will be produced by ISO technical committees. However, Adobe published documents specifying what extended features for PDF, beyond ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7), are supported in its newly released products. This makes use of the extensibility features of PDF as documented in ISO 32000-1 in Annex E. Adobe declared all extended features in Adobe Extension Level 3 and 5 have been accepted for a new proposal of ISO 32000-2 (a.k.a. PDF 2.0).[11]    The specifications for PDF are backward inclusive. The PDF 1.7 specification includes all of the functionality previously documented in the Adobe PDF Specifications for versions 1.0 through 1.6. Where Adobe removed certain features of PDF from their standard, they too are not contained in ISO 32000-1.[1]    PDF documents conforming to ISO 32000-1 carry the PDF version number 1.7. Documents containing Adobe extended features still carry the PDF base version number 1.7 but also contain an indication of which extension was followed during document creation.”   I added the emphasis to make a point. For understanding how files are internally structured it is not always enough to just know the formatting standard adhered to when files were created (e.g. PDF version 1.7). Sometimes we need more information about how the particular application chose to interpret or, as in the example above, implement the standard. This information could be represented in many cases simply by knowing what the creating application was. This is shown/implicitly acknowledged in the Wikipedia extract by the inclusion of the application association with the name of each PDF version listed in the list of versions.

D-Lib Magazine