On PDF/A Conformance and Font Usage in PDF Documents Provided by Public Sector Organizations

Q3 Business, Management and Accounting

International Journal of Standardization Research Pub Date : 2023-09-06 DOI:10.4018/ijsr.329605

Thomas Fischer, Björn Lundell, Jonas Gamalielsson

{"title":"On PDF/A Conformance and Font Usage in PDF Documents Provided by Public Sector Organizations","authors":"Thomas Fischer, Björn Lundell, Jonas Gamalielsson","doi":"10.4018/ijsr.329605","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The use of appropriate fonts and file formats for long-term maintenance of digital assets is a challenge for organizations in the public sector. The article reports from a study which investigated the PDF/A conformance and font usage in PDF files provided by Swedish public sector organizations (PSOs). This article presents an analysis of the PDF files' properties and font usage including a categorization of fonts' licenses. This study is motivated by the PDF/A-1 standard's requirement that ‘only fonts that are legally embeddable in a file for unlimited, universal rendering shall be used.' Analyzing PDF sets from three PSOs, the finding shows that the proportion of files that claim or succeed at conforming to PDF/A greatly varies among the sets despite similar backgrounds. Although the most popular way to make use of fonts is by embedding a subset of the font data, for some fonts expected to be ‘always available,' a considerable proportion of PDF files does not include any font data. This puts the onus of locating this data on the PDF reader which is problematic for long-term archival.","PeriodicalId":53146,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Standardization Research","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Standardization Research","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.4018/ijsr.329605","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Business, Management and Accounting","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The use of appropriate fonts and file formats for long-term maintenance of digital assets is a challenge for organizations in the public sector. The article reports from a study which investigated the PDF/A conformance and font usage in PDF files provided by Swedish public sector organizations (PSOs). This article presents an analysis of the PDF files' properties and font usage including a categorization of fonts' licenses. This study is motivated by the PDF/A-1 standard's requirement that ‘only fonts that are legally embeddable in a file for unlimited, universal rendering shall be used.' Analyzing PDF sets from three PSOs, the finding shows that the proportion of files that claim or succeed at conforming to PDF/A greatly varies among the sets despite similar backgrounds. Although the most popular way to make use of fonts is by embedding a subset of the font data, for some fonts expected to be ‘always available,' a considerable proportion of PDF files does not include any font data. This puts the onus of locating this data on the PDF reader which is problematic for long-term archival.

查看原文本刊更多论文

公营机构提供的PDF文件的PDF/A一致性及字体使用

对于公共部门的组织来说，使用适当的字体和文件格式来长期维护数字资产是一个挑战。本文报告了一项研究，该研究调查了瑞典公共部门组织(pso)提供的PDF文件中的PDF/ a一致性和字体使用情况。本文分析了PDF文件的属性和字体使用情况，包括字体许可的分类。这项研究的动机是PDF/ a -1标准的要求，即“只能使用合法嵌入文件中的字体，以实现无限的、通用的渲染。”分析三个pso的PDF集，发现尽管背景相似，但声称或成功符合PDF/A的文件比例在集合之间差异很大。虽然最流行的使用字体的方法是嵌入字体数据的子集，但对于一些希望“永远可用”的字体，相当大比例的PDF文件不包含任何字体数据。这就把定位这些数据的责任放在了PDF阅读器上，这对于长期存档来说是有问题的。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

International Journal of Standardization Research Business, Management and Accounting-Management of Technology and Innovation

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The primary mission of the International Journal of Standardization Research (IJSR) is to publish research findings that will advance knowledge relating to standards and standardization for diverse settings and applications. IJSR aims to be an authoritative reference source and a prime outlet for scholarly information within the standardization research community. By focusing on emerging research and trends in this field, IJSR targets researchers, scholars, policy-makers, managers, and practitioners from both businesses and standards organizations and decision makers.