Twenty Years of Trust: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of PDF/A-1

This month the PDF industry is celebrating the 20th anniversary of PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005), the publication of which revolutionized digital preservation.
Before this standard, archiving suffered from dependency issues. PDF/A-1, based on a constrained subset of PDF 1.4, mandated self-contained, device-independent documents. These rules ensure that a PDF/A document’s appearance can be reliably maintained over centuries, regardless of viewing software.
Rapidly adopted globally, the principles established in PDF/A-1 persist in later standards like PDF/A-4, which is based on PDF 2.0, the latest ISO standard for PDF.
Happy 20th, PDF/A! We (ok, not us personally) fully expect to be celebrating your 200th anniversary in November 2225!

This month the PDF industry is celebrating the 20th anniversary of PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005), the publication of which revolutionized digital preservation.
Before this standard, archiving suffered from dependency issues. PDF/A-1, based on a constrained subset of PDF 1.4, mandated self-contained, device-independent documents. These rules ensure that a PDF/A document’s appearance can be reliably maintained over centuries, regardless of viewing software.
Rapidly adopted globally, the principles established in PDF/A-1 persist in later standards like PDF/A-4, which is based on PDF 2.0, the latest ISO standard for PDF.
Happy 20th, PDF/A! We (ok, not us personally) fully expect to be celebrating your 200th anniversary in November 2225!
IDM asks: “will you be ready for PDF 2.0”?
ISO 32000 Project co-Leader and PDF Association member Peter Wyatt talks PDF 2.0 and the upcoming PDF Day Australia conference on November 25 in Sydney.

October 2016 by Duff Johnson

The latest veraPDF now includes batch processing (beta), additional error-handling and extraction of the AFRelationship key.






















