I run a fairly large service for reviewing conference submissions, almost all
in PDF, with several ten thousand submissions each year. You'd be amazed how
much broken PDF is out there, produced by all kinds of tools. Older versions of
Microsoft Office and various "free" PDF conversion tools routinely fail to
include fonts, for example, thus, violating PDF/A requirements. Others break
PDF so that text can't be cut-and-pasted.
We don't even try for PDF/A compliance, just a much narrower set of
requirements imposed by the major academic EE/CS publishers (IEEE and ACM).
Unfortunately, I have not found a reasonable online tool (service) that
produces correct PDF 100% of the time. Adobe Acrobat works most of the time for
the desktop, but is pretty expensive. The Mac version of Word seems to have a
high success ratio. http://www.freepdfconvert.com/ works frequently. Etc. We
still do a fair amount of hand-tweaking and tool-trying, so if you truly want
100% PDF/A compliance, be prepared not just for buying a fairly expensive tool
chain to check this (we use Callas PDFtools for compliance checking), but also
technical support staff to deal with the 1% or so of files that won't convert
well.
NSF also does online conversion from Word to PDF. It kind of, mostly works.
(Such tools tend to be available for Windows servers only, unfortunately, and
are certainly not free. These tools typically script an Office client to do the
conversion, since that's the only sure way to get something that approximates
the PDF output that Office produces. Some use OpenOffice, but this seems to
sometimes cause rendering problems.)
Thus, requiring authors to upload "random" PDF isn't unreasonable, in my view,
but requiring PDF/A or doing server-side PDF conversion raises the bar
significantly, for all parties in the process.
Henning
On Nov 17, 2011, at 12:52 PM, David Morris wrote:
On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Robinson Tryon wrote:
If authors take on the responsibility of creating and verifying the
fidelity of exported versions, then I think everything will be peachy.
What can we do to encourage this practice?
Start by compensating them for the work required to conform to this
requirement?
The IETF is a bunch of volunteers, most of whom carve out time for
participation from time needed to satisfy other responsiblities.
The authors already have issues with the basic tool set and compatiblity
with the computing environments needed for other life responsiblities.
Now you want to dictate a new step.
Adding a new tool/process is absurd. If you have a solution that actually
works for everyone without adding much to their time burden, test it,
demonstrate it with your own materials, etc.
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