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October 08, 2007

Mars Bar

Just noticed that there is now (as of last month) a blog for Mars ("Mars: Comments on PDF, Acrobat, XML, and the Mars file format"). See this from the initial post:

"The Mars Project at Adobe is aimed at creating an XML representation for PDF documents. We use a component-based model for representing different aspects of the document and we use the Universal Container Format (a Zip-based packaging format) to hold the pieces. Mars uses XML to represent the individual components where that makes sense, but otherwise uses industry standard formats to represent other components. Examples of these include Fonts (we use OpenType), Images (PNG, GIF, JPEG, JPEG2000), Color (ICC Color Profiles), etc.. We use SVG to represent page content, which fits as both an XML format and an industry standard."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 11:58 AM | | Comments (0)

August 23, 2007

pdfa.org

Following on from yesterday's post I just came across this very useful source of information on PDF/A: the PDF/A Conformance Center. This provides links to resources such as this whitepaper PDF/A - A new Standard for Long-Term Archiving, and a number of technical notes, especially Metadata and PDF/A-1(also available as a PDF). (This latter corrects some errors in the ISO standard which are to be redressed in a forthcoming Technical Corrigendum later this year.)

The site also links to the standard, to a FAQ, to PDF/A products and to news and events. There's also an RSS feed and a discussion forum.

Still difficult to find examples of PDF/A though (the discussion forum doesn't throw up too much on that score) although at least the Technical Note linked to above is a PDF/A-1 document as can be seen from this XMP description:

      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:pdfaid="http://www.aiim.org/pdfa/ns/id/">
         <pdfaid:part>1</pdfaid:part>
         <pdfaid:conformance>A</pdfaid:conformance>
      </rdf:Description>

As noted before, PDF/A may be more (and less) than CrossRef publishers require at this time, but nonetheless it is certainly a useful yardstick as regards embedding metadata within a PDF and is anyway a technology worth tracking in its own right.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:06 AM | | Comments (0)