"Archiving with PDF (Part 1)"

By Leah Lothringer
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 6 for 2007

Previously in PDF Perspectives, we’ve discussed the benefits of migrating to a paperless office environment, whereby physical documents are converted into an electronic format. For the past few years, a great many businesses have been doing this, but not necessarily because they want a paperless office. Rather, because of the benefits associated with creating and maintaining an electronic document archive; principally, convenient accessibility for anybody with permission. Furthermore, the PDF format enjoys particular popularity as it preserves the exact look and feel of the original physical document.

Need any further convincing? The quality of paper documents erodes with time and use. And although programs written for viewing electronic documents come and go, the basic specifications of the PDF file format are in the public domain. So the demise of a company that developed a PDF viewer will not affect the relevance of your electronic archive.

Additionally, support for metadata is one of the greatest advantages electronic documents have over paper. Metadata can be used to organize and locate your archived documents. Don’t know what metadata is? Check out David Fishel’s in-depth discussion on metadata at Planet PDF.

So where do you start? The first step in establishing a PDF-based archive is in acquiring the PDF documents themselves. If you are creating your PDFs from other document types then you'll need some form of creation or conversion application. Creation applications appear in the source program as an additional printer; to create a PDF document, the user simply prints the file using the PDF printer, and a PDF file is created. Popular examples of PDF creation products are Nitro PDF Express, Nitro PDF Professional and Adobe Acrobat.

Look out for the next issue of PDF Perspectives, in which I’ll be looking at scanning, batch converting and searching.