When (not) to migrate a PDF to PDF/A
27 August 2014
It is well-known that PDF documents can contain features that are preservation risks (e.g. see here and here). Migration of existing PDFs to PDF/A is sometimes advocated as a strategy for mitigating these risks. However, the benefits of this approach are often questionable, and the migration process can also be quite risky in itself. As I often get questions on this subject, I thought it might be worthwhile to do a short write-up on this.
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PDF
- PDF Quality assessment for digitisation batches with Python, PyMuPDF and Pillow
- Escape from the phantom of the PDF
- VeraPDF parse status as a proxy for PDF rendering: experiments with the Synthetic PDF Testset
- Identification of PDF preservation risks with VeraPDF and JHOVE
- On The Significant Properties of Spreadsheets
- PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools
- Policy-based assessment with VeraPDF - a first impression
- PDF/A as a preferred, sustainable format for spreadsheets?
- Why PDF/A validation matters, even if you don't have PDF/A - Part 2
- Why PDF/A validation matters, even if you don't have PDF/A
- When (not) to migrate a PDF to PDF/A
- Identification of PDF preservation risks: analysis of Govdocs selected corpus
- Identification of PDF preservation risks with Apache Preflight: the sequel
- What do we mean by "embedded" files in PDF?
- Identification of PDF preservation risks with Apache Preflight: a first impression
- PDF – Inventory of long-term preservation risks
