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

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Author(s): Thomas Fischer (University of Skövde, Sweden), Björn Lundell (University of Skövde, Sweden)and Jonas Gamalielsson (University of Skövde, Sweden)
Copyright: 2023
Volume: 20
Issue: 1
Pages: 19
Source title: International Journal of Standardization Research (IJSR)
DOI: 10.4018/IJSR.329605

Keywords: Computer Science & IT / Engineering Science Reference / IT Policy & Standardization / IT Policy and Standardization

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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.

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

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