Marshall,
--On Monday, 02 January, 2006 16:03 -0500 Marshall Eubanks
<tme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> The project, currently referred to as PDF/A, will address
> the growing need to electronically
> archive documents in a way that will ensure preservation of
> their contents over an extended period of
> time, and will further ensure that those documents will be
> able to be retrieved and rendered with a
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> consistent and predictable result in the future. This need
> exists in a growing number of international
> government and industry segments, including legal systems,
> libraries, newspapers, regulated industries, and others.
>
> The work will address the use of PDF for multi-page
> documents that may contain a mixture of
> text, raster images and vector graphics. It will also address
> the features and requirements that must be
> supported by reading devices that will be used to retrieve and
> render the archived documents.
^^^^^^
Emphasis added, of course.
As I have understood it, PDF/A is intended as an archival format
for the sorts of documents that exist on paper, with a primary
goal of being able to render things that look just like the
paper looked like. It has not been a requirement that PDF/A
support extraction of text, editing, insertion of new materials,
and other forms of markup. Indeed, some of the participants in
the PDF/A effort might consider support for some of those things
to be liabilities. Your note reinforces that impression.
As such, it is (IMO, barely) possible that PDF/A would be a
reasonable format for storing archival documents such as RFCs.
But it would be a terrible format for working documents such as
I-Ds, for the reasons discussed in my earlier note.
john
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