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Re: Alternative formats for IDs

2006-01-02 14:39:50
Marshall,

--On Monday, 02 January, 2006 16:03 -0500 Marshall Eubanks
<tme(_at_)multicasttech(_dot_)com> wrote:

...
  The project, currently referred to as PDF/A, will address
the  growing need to electronically
archive documents in a way that will ensure preservation of
their  contents over an extended period of
time, and will further ensure that those documents will be
able to be  retrieved and rendered with a
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
consistent and predictable result in the future.  This need
exists in  a growing number of international
government and industry segments, including legal systems,
libraries,  newspapers, regulated industries, and others.

  The work will address the use of PDF for multi-page
documents that  may contain a mixture of
text, raster images and vector graphics.  It will also address
the  features and requirements that must be
supported by reading devices that will be used to retrieve and
render  the archived documents.
  ^^^^^^

Emphasis added, of course.

As I have understood it, PDF/A is intended as an archival format
for the sorts of documents that exist on paper, with a primary
goal of being able to render things that look just like the
paper looked like.  It has not been a requirement that PDF/A
support extraction of text, editing, insertion of new materials,
and other forms of markup.  Indeed, some of the participants in
the PDF/A effort might consider support for some of those things
to be liabilities.  Your note reinforces that impression.  

As such, it is (IMO, barely) possible that PDF/A would be a
reasonable format for storing archival documents such as RFCs.
But it would be a terrible format for working documents such as
I-Ds, for the reasons discussed in my earlier note.

    john





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