For some reason David Stevenson’s last blog post brought a comparison between email attachments and blood types to mind. A person with type O blood is often called a universal donor, because (almost) everyone can be safely given their blood in a transfusion. In the same way, a person with type AB blood is called a universal recipient, because they can safely be given blood from (almost) anyone else.

David effectively described a PDF file as the universal donor for email attachments, like type O blood. You can be pretty sure that the recipient will be able to read it and see the same page layout, images, fonts, text etc as you did before you sent it. So if you want the recipient to be able to access documents as easily as possible, and to read through them in the way that you planned, a PDF is the best way to go.

But just like all best practice, you just know that not everyone will follow it. Your own organization’s internal guidelines often won’t help when you’re receiving files from outside your firewall.

You therefore have to consider not only how you will send email attachments, but also how you might want to handle those that you’re sent by other people. In a sense you need to be a universal recipient as well as a universal donor. This is where the blood type analogy breaks down, because it’s not possible to be both for blood transfusions, but you can do both for email. All you need to do is make sure that you have the tools to read all of the formats that people are likely to send documents to you in … and then ideally to convert them to PDF to let you forward them to your colleagues and follow best practice for delivery!

With the release of gDoc Fusion 2.5, we introduced a new capability, to display and convert well over 200 file types – word processing, spreadsheet, graphic and image formats. Many are “legacy” formats – outdated file formats from applications that were once popular, maybe even the “de facto” standards of their day, such as Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect on DOS.

gDoc Fusion also converts contemporary formats such as DOCX, XLXS & PPTX, and it does all these conversions without the need for the application to be installed.

Why support all these legacy formats? gDoc Fusion is all about assembly of documents from multiple sources. It’s also about getting to the information locked inside documents. For some requirements, this capability is vital. One is e-discovery, defined by www.lexbe.com as “the collection, preparation, review and production of electronic documents in litigation discovery”. Because of the pace of software development, it is not unusual for vital evidence to be contained in obsolete file formats; multi-format viewing and conversion then becomes a necessity, not a luxury.

The multi-format capability offered by gDoc Fusion is unusual in a desktop software product. It’s more usually the domain of enterprise-level (read expensive) document management or systems aimed at a specific vertical market such as legal case management. gDoc Fusion also offers the “traditional” PDF creation method of printing to a virtual printer, adding hundreds more applications that can generate a PDF.

The question that naturally arises is “OK, I’ve converted my documents, but what’s to say the converted document is going to be any longer lived?” The answer is that the industry has recognised this problem, and has developed international standards for electronic document archival based on PDF, i.e. PDF/A. Moreover, the nature of PDF means that it can remain part of a live, searchable archive that’s easy to print or even convert back to an authoring format. gDoc Fusion supports saving documents in PDF/A.

Of course, the hardware changes too. The rapid development of storage media poses an altogether different challenge to CIOs who must also consider migration of the data itself to prevent it being locked on media for which no hardware exists to read it. At least there is an answer for the file formats themselves.