Converting pdfs

[rikona]

Hello all,

Oops - sent the wrong one [late and tired] - here's what I meant to
send...

Thanks to Lucio, Bob, and NoOp for the replies.

Thursday, October 25, 2012, 9:30:29 PM, Dave wrote:

> Long term formats are subject to many uncertainties,

I have learned that the hard way - I have stuff that is in formats
nobody has heard of now. :-) What has worked best, for longest, is
plain old text/ascii. I'm still partial to that, and that was one of
the things I was thinking of converting to: pdf --> ascii.

Friday, October 26, 2012, 12:14:34 AM, Alexander wrote:

>> I have a ton of stuff stored in pdf format that will need to be
>> accessed for many years to come. With Adobe dropping some linux
>> support, is this a significant risk?

> No. Especially not, if your stuff is in PDF/A format. This is
> standardized by ISO and supported by "every" reader currently
> available (I guess…).

I didn't know that was an ISO standard - Those hang around for a
while. :-)

>> Is there a way to convert pdfs to another format, **reliably**, so
>> I can start to convert docs to a more accessible long-term format?

> PDF/A is already the right choice, I'd say. Or even just ordinary
> PDF. 

I'll worry less, then - may be around for a while.

Friday, October 26, 2012, 1:33:44 AM, Paul wrote:

> PDF is the best structured container format available right now, and
> has been for the last 10-15 years; even if the archiving and print
> industries were initially slow to adopt it.

>> With Adobe dropping some linux support, is this a significant
>> risk?

> PDF is that format you want. It's a text-based format that you can
> open in Emacs if you need to; which you can send to any PostScript3
> printer if you need to; and which you can render natively using
> several options including Mac OSX' Quatz2D (display PDF), or
> libpoppler on Ubuntu, or Mupdf, or several other choices.

OK - thanks to all of you for the info. I was perhaps more worried
than I should have been. I'll stick with it for now...

> Don't change anything, except your PDF reader software,

I only use adobe for docs that seem to have 'fussy' stuff in it that
gives problems to the others - too many security scares for me...



 rikona