I am working on software to store legal documents and I was thinking that PDF might be an ideal format to work in. However I am a little confused as to what would best suit my needs in this regard in the actual format of the PDF file.
I have the following requirements for the documents:
- will be stored for a minimum of 7 years if not longer
- not editable
- contain both images and text (images will be in .jpg format ideally)
I was originally looking at using PDF/A-1 however I have discovered that this format does not seem to like using JPEG images, or at least it doesn’t when using JODConverter.
Any suggestions/explanations as to which format would best meet these needs would be much appreciated!
For the requirements you described, PDF/A-1b (yes, b at the end!) is the ideal format. The b is for basic — it has less strict requirements to meet than the PDF/A-1a (a at the end), which is for accessible (or advanced, as I mnemonic it).
If you have no difficulty implementing PDF/A-1a, you may as well go for it. However, depending on your source documents, PDF/A-1a may be extremely difficult and nearly impossible to generate (as it requires the additional tagging of the file’s content for the accessibility features).
As for JPEG: of course PDF/A-1b supports JPEGs. It does not allow JPEG2000 compression to be used, because that algorithm was patent encumbered at the time of defining the PDF/A-1b standard. PDF/A-1b generating software therefor must re-compress objects using this type of compression with one of the other methods (which does not pose a big practical problem though.)
You may also want to look at the The PDF/A Competence Center (PDFA) website. (Disclosure: I’m a member of the PDFA.)