"Archiving with PDF (Part 2)"

By Leah Lothringer
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 7 for 2007

It is prudent to remember that PDF was created to duplicate paper documents, and is unsurpassed when it comes to preserving the physical characteristics of the source file. PDFs also offer support for multi-page documents.

Properly-created PDF documents contain all their content in machine-readable form. This, combined with PDF metadata capabilities (as discussed in the last issue of PDF Perspectives), makes it possible to search an indexed PDF-based archive in ways simply impossible with a conventional paper-based archive.

It is important to bear in mind though, some extended features of PDF are not appropriate for archival. For example, functionality that relies on external helper applications, like embedded video and audio files. Care should be taken to ensure that archived PDFs do not include unnecessary "frills".

If you wish to convert physical paper to PDF, you will need to scan the documents and perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on them if you intend to index them for searching. Over at Planet PDF, Ernest Svenson discusses OCR in practical terms.

So you’ve established your electronic archive – and it’s enormous. To find what you’re looking for, you could open PDFs one-by-one and manually search for text. More sensible would be to create an index of your entire PDF archive. An indexed PDF archive offers the option of having your PDF archived available for searching on networks, web-sites, CDs or DVDs. A popular application that falls into this category is PDF Index Everything.

Hopefully this discussion has given you a good first impression of the possibilities associated with PDF archives; if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.