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Companies turn to PDF/A standard for document archiving

Antony Savvas
Thursday 17 January 2008 05:19

Companies are increasingly turning to PDF/A as the uniform format forlong-term archiving.

A survey of 377 IT decision-makers throughout Europe found that PDF/A is now nearly as well-known as the TIFF and PDF archiving formats, and is even more common than Jpeg.

The survey, by the PDF/A Competence Center in Berlin, found that nearly half of those expressing an interest in PDF/A have specific plans for introducing the format within the next year.

Companies using the PDF/A format can be certain that their documents will remain readable in the long term, said the PDF/A Competence Center. This satisfies legal requirements and ensures that the digitally archived information is available for decades or more, it said.

PDF/A is based on PDF and supports colour, full-text features and metadata, and, as an ISO standard, provides users with maximum security.

Although only 11% of respondents currently use PDF/A in their business, 80% indicated short-term to long-term plans for its use.