PDF/A (PDF for Archiving) 2005-09-14 Software PDF/A is an ISO (International Standards Organization) standard for the long term preservation of electronic documents. The PDF/A specification references the published PDF (Portable Document Format) secification. PDF/A is a digital format for representing documents. It is applicable to documents containing combinations of character, raster, and vector data. PDF/A provides guidance for the application of PDF to the requirements of long-term archiving. Businesses, governments, libraries, archives, and other institutions and individuals around the world already use PDF to represent considerable bodies of important information. Much of this information must be kept for substantial lengths of time; some must be kept permanently. These PDF documents must remain useable and accessible across multiple generations of technology. The future use of, and access to, these objects depends upon maintaining their visual appearance as well as their higher-order properties, such as the logical organization of pages, sections, and paragraphs, machine recoverable text stream in natural reading order, and a variety of administrative, preservation, and descriptive metadata. Adobe Systems Incorporated makes the PDF specification publicly available. However, the inclusive, feature-rich nature of the format requires that additional constraints be placed on its use to make it suitable for the long-term preservation of electronic documents. The PDF/A standard specifies how to use the Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.4 for long-term preservation of electronic documents. Records Management Component Framework Presentation / Interface Content Rendering PDF