On 6/5/07, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To answer the original question, though... it depends on what kind of documents you want to archive, and for what purposes you're archiving them. Assuming textual content: If you want them to be readable by future alien-like civilizations, use ASCII. If you want to preserve printable formatting, use PDF. If you want something else, try RTF, ODT, TeX, etc.
RTF isn't exactly stable. Microsoft has moved that target several times. And right now, I wouldn't want to bet on the current version of ODT (ODF v. 1.1). I'm a member of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee and director of legal affairs for the OpenDocument Foundation. What seems to be the most likely outcome at this juncture of the war between ODF and Microsoft's Office XML formats is a harmonization of the two, with ODF providing the common functionality. But that would require a reduced feature set in ODT with some extensions to accommodate Microsoft's needs. In other words, existing ODF documents will likely be incompatible with the harmonized version. The four workshop conclusions PDFs linked from this page, < http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6702/5935>, offer a pretty good set of bullet points on the factors driving toward the harmonization outcome. PDF has full open-source coverage, AFAIK, unless Adobe has continued
to release new features. PDF's are being used in the legal industry by both courts and law firms, if that is any indication of their intended lastingness.
Yes. But it should be kept in mind that PDF is generally regarded as an interim solution here. There seems to be pretty broad agreement among those working at the cutting edge of legal archiving that the future of judicial record-keeping will be a variety of XML formats rather than PDF, with liberal use of XML transformations for interop purposes. That said, PDF/A IMHO has sufficient uptake among very large archival organizations that it is a pretty good bet for a long-term archival format. To boot, it's now an ISO standard so many of the concerns with Adobe control have been allayed. Adobe recently agreed to Europe's request and has submitted PDF/X 1.7 to the ISO standardization process and that work is underway. If Docbook is sufficiently featureful for the task, I'd suggest its consideration for archival purposes, perhaps a dual-archival system with PDFs and Docbook files. Docbook is pretty stable compared to ODT and RTF. Best regards, Marbux
_______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
