Fair enough. Asking someone to give you a UTF-8 (or other Unicode
encoding) plain text file though -- you better try to heuristically
check the encoding before ingesting it, and plan on a lot of failures.
Typical users using typical consumer software (which tends to be
somewhat unpredictable with character encodings) can't be trusted to
give you a UTF-8 encoding just because you specify it, or to have any
idea what this means or how to do it.
And checking the to see if the 'true' encoding of a plain text file is
what it's advertised as in an automated fashion is heuristic at best,
and not going to be perfect.
And you're still going to have trouble with complicated mathematical
formulas, molecular diagrams, other diagrams, etc.
Jonathan
Doran, Michael D wrote:
As far as electronic formats go, I think PDF is as good as
anything -- except maybe plain ASCII text, which is not
nearly as useable (and doesn't allow diagrams,
mathematical equations, non-English letters, etc).
There is no requirement that plain text be limited to the ASCII character set
repertoire. Although once they were almost synonymous, that is no longer the
case [1]. Plain text can encompass anything and everything in the Unicode
character set. That includes non-Roman scripts, mathematical symbols, yada,
yada, yada.
-- Michael
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text
# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
# [email protected]
# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 9:13 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Durability of PDFs
The bet is that PDFs are so popular that _someone_ (the archival
community if no-one else, but probably someone else) will ensure that
they continue to be readable somehow.
These are real non-trivial issues in electronic archiving
though, issues
that the archival community. It is generally a safe assumption that
good electronic archiving over the decades-and-more term
requires some
regular attention by an electronic archivist to make sure that files
remain readable, and are converted to new formats when necessary. As
well as attention to avoiding actual bit-level corruption of
files. You
can't neccesarily just dump files on a HD and ignore them and expect
they'll be readable in 100 years, that much is true -- and
true pretty
much regardless of particular electronic format you choose.
As far as electronic formats go, I think PDF is as good as
anything --
except maybe plain ASCII text, which is not nearly as useable (and
doesn't allow diagrams, mathematical equations, non-English letters,
etc). I don't know why you're colleague has decided that
"30-40 years"
is the horizon after which PDF specifically will become "unreadable",
this seems like just a wild guess to me, but it would be
interesting to
see if he has any particular evidence to back up this claim.
So there are real issues with electronic archiving, but
unless they lead
you to refuse to accept electronic submissions at all, you're
just going
to have to deal with them, it's not really an issue of PDF
specifically,
but it is true that "just dump files on a HD and forget about
them and
assume they'll be readable in 100 years" is not a particularly safe
electronic archiving strategy.
Jonathan
Mike Taylor wrote:
Dear CODE4LIB colleagues,
In one of my alternative incarnations, I am a zoological taxonomist.
One of the big issues for taxonomy right now is whether to accept as
nomenclaturally valid papers that are published only in electronic
form, i.e. not printed on paper by a publisher.
In a discussion of this matter, a colleague has claimed:
[PDF files will not become unreadable] in the next 30-40 years.
Possibly not in the 20 years that will follow. After that,
when only
30-year and older documents are in the PDF format, the danger will
increase that this information will not be readable any more. It is
generally considered as quite unlikely that PDF will be readable in
100 years.
I would appreciate any comments that anyone on this list has on the
likelihood that PDF will be unreadable in 100 years.
Many thanks,
_/|_
___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[email protected]>
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\ "Can't someone act COMPLETELY OUT OF CHARACTER
without arousing
suspicion?" -- Bob the Angry Flower, www.angryflower.com
