The newly created UK chapter of the PDF/A Competence Centre is announcing their presence with a seminar in London this Friday. There are speakers from Crawford Technologies, Luratech, Callas and the main PDF/A Competence Centre itself … oh yes, and me!

The seminar will look in detail at:

• What is the PDF/A standard and how is it used?

• What are the benefits of PDF/A?

• Which documents can be archived into PDF/A?

• What do PDF/A, PDF / A – 1a, PDF/A – 1b, PDF 2 mean?

It’s being held on Nov 19, 2010 from 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM at:

Hubworking Centre
5 Wormwood Street
London, London EC2M 1RQ

For more details, or to book attendance, see the event web site.

See you there!

Martin

One of the things that’s always been a little vague in the PDF Reference Manual is exactly what an application that reads PDF absolutely has to support in order to be labeled as “PDF compliant”. In the transition to an ISO standard (ISO 32000-1:2008) that didn’t change, but the importance of a formal definition of what a reader must do became more important in some markets.

I’m a member of the ad hoc task force that has been set up in ISO to look at all the statements about reader behavior in the draft of the next version of the PDF standard. The goal is to split them into a number of categories, along the lines of:

• All compliant PDF readers must do these things
• All compliant interactive PDF readers must do these things (but server based converters, RIPs etc don’t need to)
• If a PDF reader supports a section of the PDF standard then it must do this aspect of that section (this is sometimes re-stated as “if the application supports then it must support it properly!”)
• Choosing not to support these features will not make a PDF reader non-compliant.

All of this obviously interacts both with the subset standards such as PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/X etc, and with a specific buyer’s requirements for the feature set that they need.

I’d be very interested to hear your views on what you think should be the baseline for what every PDF reader must do, and why … or even if you think such things should be left entirely to the market in selecting products that meet specific needs. I’ll use any feedback on this article to help shape my input to the task force.

Thanks