I wanted to share the announcement of a new report from the National
Digital Stewardship Alliance on the PDF/A-3 file format specification
that was released in late 2012. The PDF/A specifications are fairly
widely used to define a "more preservable" subset of the hugely
complex general PDF specification (A is for "archival"). The new
"incremental" upgrade to PDF/A raises some very nasty issues for
institutions relying on this specification in an archival context; at
the very least, migration to this new version is going to take some
careful consideration, and potentially some substantial expense and
disruption. There's a helpful short overview on the Library of
Congress Digital Preservation blog at:
The full report is at
Many thanks to NDSA for alerting the community to this serious
potential problem, and for a good analysis of the issues involved.
Clifford Lynch