If it can be of any assurance, the view described in the NISO-article isn’t representative for the way the archival community and archivists look at PDF/A as a preservation format. Archivists are (or should be) well aware of the risks and issues involved with a migration to PDF/A…
As already pointed out by others, many of the issues I mention in my blog (e.g. multimedia, fonts) just follow directly from the ISO standards, so I don’t see why this should be backed up by experimental evidence.
You’re right that the stuff under “complexity and effect of…
I don’t know what sort of objects those were but this is where emulation could well be a better solution, with fewer errors/risks and at a lower overall cost.
i.e. no need to convert Lotus 123 files as they can be opened in the original software in DOSBox (host architecture independent),…
I thought the blog was a good overview of the issues (from someone who has looked into the issues a lot) and didn’t pretend to be anything other than that. If the blog post sparks fears then that is probably a good thing! It means that whoever has that fear hadn’t done their…
Hi Will, Yes, I absolutely agree that for most practical purposes Acrobat is much more important than any other viewer. As for the (lack of) scalability of that test, it’s worth adding that Adobe publishes an Adobe PDF Library SDK:
This situation is somewhat analogous to the Microsoft Office formats; Microsoft are the originator of the standards and the reference implementation. Files that MS Office won’t open may open elsewhere (LibreOffice etc), but then how do you know…
Hi Johan,
If it can be of any assurance, the view described in the NISO-article isn’t representative for the way the archival community and archivists look at PDF/A as a preservation format. Archivists are (or should be) well aware of the risks and issues involved with a migration to PDF/A…
Hi Ross,
As already pointed out by others, many of the issues I mention in my blog (e.g. multimedia, fonts) just follow directly from the ISO standards, so I don’t see why this should be backed up by experimental evidence.
You’re right that the stuff under “complexity and effect of…
As to your last point/question Will, Acrobat running on Windows XP in a browser is already here:
We are running a local installation of the bw-…
I don’t know what sort of objects those were but this is where emulation could well be a better solution, with fewer errors/risks and at a lower overall cost.
i.e. no need to convert Lotus 123 files as they can be opened in the original software in DOSBox (host architecture independent),…
I agree with you both that more evidence would be great. Unfortunately it is quite costly to collect.
In the research I led while at Archives…
Hi Ross,
I thought the blog was a good overview of the issues (from someone who has looked into the issues a lot) and didn’t pretend to be anything other than that. If the blog post sparks fears then that is probably a good thing! It means that whoever has that fear hadn’t done their…
Now I am excited, thank you a lot!
edit: Of course I cannot just download the library/search it via maven and connect it and embedd it in my tools. Would have been cool, though…
Hi Will, Yes, I absolutely agree that for most practical purposes Acrobat is much more important than any other viewer. As for the (lack of) scalability of that test, it’s worth adding that Adobe publishes an Adobe PDF Library SDK:
…
I think we agree, but I’m going to add this:
This situation is somewhat analogous to the Microsoft Office formats; Microsoft are the originator of the standards and the reference implementation. Files that MS Office won’t open may open elsewhere (LibreOffice etc), but then how do you know…