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3. Standard Long Term Preservation Formats

3.3. PDF (Portable Document Format)

Usage

Use for formatted document type records (e.g. those that generate paged records, such as word processing programs).

Standard

PDF files must conform 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 ‘Errata for PDF Reference, third edition’ (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html visited 14 February 2006), except for the following restrictions and qualifications.

When using Adobe’s Distiller (5.0) the following options should be set in both the Distiller preferences and in the Adobe Postscript Printer print options:

• Settings/Job Options/General
• Compatability: Acrobat 5.0 (PDF 1.4).
• 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.
• Settings/Job Options/Fonts
• Fonts: Embed all fonts.
• Settings/Job Options/Color
• Device Dependent Data options should not be checked, and Transfer Functions should be removed.
• Settings/Security
• Open password unchecked (no password present).
• Change permission password unchecked (no password present),
• No printing permissions unchecked.
• No changing the document permission unchecked.
• No content copying or extraction permission unchecked.
• No adding or changing comments and form fields permission unchecked.

Qualifications

The following features of PDF version 1.4 must not be used:

• PDF content external to the PDF file. This means that:
• All external files must be embedded.
• All fonts must be embedded.
• Reference Xobjects must embedded.
• Use of the Open Prepress Interface (OPI) is prohibited.
• The PDF encryption option.
• Rendering options dependent on specific output devices. These include:
• CIE-based colour to device colour.
• Conversions amongst device colour space.
• Transfer functions.
• Halftones.
• Scan conversion.
• Overprinting.
• Javascript actions associated with the document.
• The following types of annotations:
• Plugin extensions except that the Acrobat Self Sign Security plugin is allowed, to permit PDF files to be digitally signed. This plugin is specified in ‘PDF Public-key Digital Signature and Encryption Specification’, Version 3.2, Jim Pravetz, 12 September 2001, Adobe Systems Incorporated, and the appearance of the digital signature in the PDF document is defined in ‘Digital Signature Appearances for Public-Key Interoperability’, Adobe Systems Incorporated, September 2001.
• File Attachment annotations.
• Sound annotations.
• Movie annotations.
• Any Javascript actions, and the Launch, SubmitForm, or ImportData actions associated with Form annotations.

Note that the Standard requires that PDF viewers are to ignore annotations that they do not recognise.

Suggested value of File Encoding (M128)

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

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 (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/filefmtspecs/PDFReference.pdf visited 7 January 2003), as modified in the ‘Errata for PDF Reference, third edition’ (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/PDF14errata.txt visited 7 January 2003). It may contain digital signatures defined by PDF Public-key Digital Signature and Encryption Specification, Version 3.2, Jim Pravetz, 12 September 2001, Adobe Systems Incorporated (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/ppk_pdfspec.pdf visited 28 March 2003) and the appearance of the digital signature in a PDF document is defined in Digital Signature Appearances for Public-Key Interoperability, Adobe Systems Incorporated, September 2001 (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/PPKAppearances.pdf visited 28 March 2003). 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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