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

Author

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  • Thomas Fischer

    (University of Skövde, Sweden)

  • Björn Lundell

    (University of Skövde, Sweden)

  • Jonas Gamalielsson

    (University of Skövde, Sweden)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Fischer & Björn Lundell & Jonas Gamalielsson, 2023. "On PDF/A Conformance and Font Usage in PDF Documents Provided by Public Sector Organizations," International Journal of Standardization Research (IJSR), IGI Global, vol. 20(1), pages 1-19, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:igg:jsr000:v:20:y:2023:i:1:p:1-19
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