New Standard Address Long-Term Preservation of E-Documents

ISO 19005-1, Document management - Electronic document file format for long-term preservation - Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1) defines a file format based on Portable Document Format (PDF) which provides a mechanism for representing electronic documents in a manner that preserves their visual appearance over time, independent of the tools and systems used for creating, storing and rendering the files. PDF/A is a subset of PDF, which is already widely accepted for the delivery of final-format documents. It is estimated that the total size of the surface Web is 167 terabytes, 9.2 percent of which consist of PDF documents.