Subject: Profiling PDF for draft-ash-alt-formats

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:50:34 -0700

I've been looking at PDF/A.  Ghostscript 8.55 (not yet released)
supports PDF/A-1b output, and I understand that Adobe Distiller does
too, both as an output form and as a preflight check for conformance.

I'm inclined to suggest that the document include something like this:

PDF files to be published in this experiment are to be limited to the
PDF/A-1 profile.  PDF/A, also known as ISO 19005, is a profile of PDF
designed for long-term archival storage.  At the time of this writing,
PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005) is the current standard, based upon PDF 1.4,
while PDF/A-2 is under development, based upon PDF 1.6.  PDF/A-1 has
two profiles, PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b.  While -1a is preferable, it places
requirements on generating software that may not be easily met, so -1b
is permissible.

Among other restrictions, PDF/A-1 removes PDF's ability to transport
executable code, including Postscript and JavaScript.

We place an additional restriction on the form of the file.
The text portions of the document must be represented as text
in the PDF file, not images of text.  PDF/A-1 already disallows
encryption, which is the basis of restricting text extraction
or searching.  The combination of these restrictions ensures
that the resulting file will be searchable and the text can
be extracted.

Any thoughts?  I believe the tools to ensure this are easily available -
e.g., use ghostscript to make sure the fonts are embedded, and email the
PDF to [email-masked] and make sure that the text that comes back is
mostly the same as the ASCII version.

Thanks,
  Bill

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