Victorian Electronic Records Strategy


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Introduction

Standard
(Version 1)
  Specification 1
  Specification 2
  Specification 3

Standard
(Version 2)
  Specification 1
  Specification 2
  Specification 3
  Specification 4
  Specification 5
  Advice 9
  Advice 10
  Advice 11
  Advice 12
  Advice 13
  Advice 14

Home > Standard > Standard (Version 2) >Specification 4 > Standard Long Term Preservation Formats

3. Standard Long Term Preservation Formats

3.2. PDF-A (Portable Document Format - Archive)

Usage

Use for formatted document type records (e.g. those that generate paged records, such as word processing programs). PDF-A should be used in preference to PDF as it is an international standard long term preservation format.

Standard

PDF files must conform to ISO 19005-1:2005, ‘Document management – Electronic document file format for long-term preservation, Part 1, Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1).’ The files may be Level A or Level B conformance.

In addition to conforming to the PDF/A-1 standard, the following restrictions are imposed when generating the PDF/A-1:

Settings/Job Options/Compression
Colour Images: No downsampling; No compression.
Grayscale Images: No downsampling; No compression.
Monochrome Images: No downsampling; CCITT Group 4 compression.
Do not compress text and line art.

Suggested value of File Encoding (M128)

The following text is recommended for inclusion in the File Encoding (M128) element when the Encoding contains PDF-A.

The content of the DocumentData element is a PDF-A file (see ISO 19005-1:2005, ‘Document management – Electronic document file format for long-term preservation, Part 1, Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1)). The file conforms to ‘PDF Reference, third edition, Adobe Portable Document Format’, Version 1.4, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Addison Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-75839-3, as modified in the ‘Errata for PDF Reference, third edition’. The file has been encoded using Base64, which is defined in IETF RFC 2045 ‘Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies’, Section 6.8, ‘Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding’.

The following text is recommended for inclusion in the File Encoding (M128) element when it is not known whether the file is a PDF or PDF-A file.

The content of the DocumentData element is a PDF file. The file conforms to ‘PDF Reference, third edition, Adobe Portable Document Format’, Version 1.4, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Addison Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-75839-3, as modified in the ‘Errata for PDF Reference, third edition’. The file has been encoded using Base64, which is defined in IETF RFC 2045 ‘Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies’, Section 6.8, ‘Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding’.

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