Janusz, It is all smoke and mirrors.
For English .... you have to choose the roght font. Simple, no advanced features .... disable advanced typographic features in application if you can. Ensure the cmap table in the font is sufficiently comprehensive .... The issues Don raise still exist in PDF/A. You would need to make fundamental changes to the PDF spec for it to work for any language. For other languages, esp those in complex scripts the situation is more dire ... esp when glyphs have been reordered. The accepted work around is ActualText. But you don't necessarily need ActualText. Depends on font and language. But the rub is that it is left to implementors to decide if and when the ActualText is used. All aspects of the document ecosystem needs to be looked at. Which tools can use ActualText instead of the visible text layer. The PDF/UA spec is probably closer to the mark than the PDF/A spec. But since most archives have no control over pdf production, authors' or publishers' font selection, tools used, etc, then working with PDFs can be fairly hit and miss. For languages written in complex scripts, its usially a miss rather than a miss. I rarely see ActualText in PDF files ,even in those that need it. Andrew On Sunday, 20 March 2016, Janusz S. Bien <[email protected]> wrote: > Quote/Cytat - Andrew Cunningham <[email protected]> (Sun 20 Mar 2016 12:06:29 AM CET): > >> Hi Don, >> >> Latin is fine if you keep to simple well made fonts and avoid using more >> sophisticated typographic features available in some fonts. >> >> Dumb it down typographically and it works fine. PDF, despite all the >> current rhetoric coming from PDF software developers, is a preprint format. >> Not an archival format. > > What about PDF/A, ISO 19005-1:2005 Document Management – Electronic document file format for long term preservation? > > Best regards > > Janusz > > -- > Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bień - Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej) > Prof. Janusz S. Bień - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department) > [email protected], [email protected], http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/ > > -- Andrew Cunningham [email protected]
