Hi – I’m Greg Manuel, VP Marketing and Strategic Planning at Datalogics. I haven’t seen any online comments from last week’s (April 10-11) PDF/A Conference in Amsterdam, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts.
Quick disclaimer: these are my thoughts and recollections from the conference; this info may not be 100% accurate.
This inaugural conference was held at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam (the same hotel where John and Yoko held their famous “bed-in” in 1969) on Thursday and Friday, April 10th and 11th. sponsored by the PDF/A Competence Center. PDF/A is an ISO Standard for using PDF for long-term archival of electronic documents (see the PDF/A Competence Center for more background on PDF/A).
I was there manning the Datalogics booth in the exhibition area, but also had time to slip in to see several sessions. Rather than attempting to review the entire conference, I’ll opt instead to share a few tidbits of info which I found interesting, in no particular order:
PDF/A-2, the next “Part” of PDF/A
As PDF/A-1 is already an ISO Standard (ISO 19005-1), work is already well underway on the next “Part”, PDF/A-2 (which is expected to become ISO 19005-2). PDF/A-2 will not replace nor make obsolete PDF/A-1. This message was stressed more than once: if PDF/A-1 is working fine for you, there’s no need to migrate to PDF/A-2. Instead, PDF/A-2 conforming documents will support features not supported in PDF/A-1, including support for:
- JPEG2000 compression
- transparency
- optional content groups (OCGs), or layers
- PDF packages
PDF/A-2 will also introduce another level of conformance. Recall that PDF/A-1 defines two levels of conformance: “A” level indicates ‘All’, or complete, compliance; and “B” level indicates ‘Basic’ compliance. PDF/A-2 will introduce “U” level, or ‘Unicode’ compliance; namely, that “…any text contained in the document can be reliably extracted as a series of Unicode codepoints.”
In addition, PDF/A-2 will introduce the concept of a “PDF/A conforming reader”, a PDF viewing application will follow certain rules/behaviors when rendering PDF/A files.
PDF/A-2 won’t be based on a PDF Specification from Adobe per se; rather, it’ll be based on ISO 32000, which will give it a little more “ISO-ness” (ISO standards bodies like to base ISO standards off of other ISO standards when possible).
Notably absent from PDF/A-2 is support for 3D formats such as u3d, prc, etc. Many attendees were disappointed, and will need to wait until “Part 3″ for formal support of this type of engineering information. PDF/A-2 is targeted for 2009 approval and release.
PDF/A and digital signatures
I went to a few sessions on PDF/A and digital signatures; since I am no digital signature expert, I found these sessions a useful backgrounder. Probably the most interesting thing I discovered was that, if I understand correctly, there is a discrepancy in the ‘timescale’ of PDF/A vs. digital signatures. By this I mean that while PDF/A documents should still be supportable in 50 to 100 years, the validity of digital signatures can only be for something like 5 to 7 years. Digital signatures rely on certificates issued by Certificate Authorities; these certificates can only last up to 5-7 years max before expiring. This limit is intentional – the theory is that technology advances too quickly to ensure that methods used today to authenticate certificates might be too easily compromisable several years from now.
It’s an interesting situation: you apply a digital signature to a PDF/A to indicate “I vouch for the contents of this document”. Then in 7 years’ time the certificate expires, so the signature cannot be validated. You then have to apply a new digital signature, but this ‘changes’ the original document. So what do you do? Well, perhaps you should still archive the original, even though the digital signature cannot be validated, along with the updated PDF with the new certificate. But now the digital signature you just applied no longer means “the contents of this document are valid”, instead it means something like “I vouch for the validity of this document at the time I applied my signature”. This is slightly different, and may have different legal implications…
In addition, you’ve just doubled your space requirements for archiving; and over 100 years you may be managing 15-20 PDFs for each original that you had stored…? I’m guessing that something will be done, either on the PDF/A side or the digital signature side, or on the implementation/best practices side, to change this model.
PDF/A Test Suite
Finally, I wanted to mention that the PDF/A Competence Center announced that they are working on a PDF/A Test Suite, a set of a few hundred PDF documents which can be used to test applications/environments for PDF/A conformance. The Test Suite is expected to be available as a public download (with no fees) from the PDF/A Competence Center website later this summer.
I think I’ll end it here – all in all, an interesting informative conference. I’m sure we’ll be back next year.
