callas pdfaPilot 5 Archiving Emails with pdfaPilot David van Driessche CTO, Four Pees - david.van.driessche@fourpees.com

What’s new in pdfaPilot 5?

Email to PDF/A

- Why and for whom?

Adjustable reports based on HTML-templates

!Support for ePub 3.0

!Support for ZUGFeRD (release candidate) - Specific for Germany

!Under the hood:

- New font engine

- New transparency flattening and rendering engine

- Better color transformations

Performance improvements for process-plans

Emails replace “documents”

… and have to be integrated in document archiving processes

!Which leads to questions:

- What’s the original format for an email?

- Is it standardised?

- Can it be archived securely?

!!!

!

What’s in an email?

Header

- Equivalent to letter head in paper letters

- But the actual routing happens through SMTP

Body

- Can combine different variants

- Straight (7-bit ASCII) text

- Simple formatted text (bold, italic), with specific encodings

- Fully formatted content with HTML, possibly images…

- No guarantee that the different pieces of content are equivalent!

Attachments

- Embedded in ASCII

- Can be document formats, archives (ZIP) or applications (EXE)

!

What’s the standard email format?

Server: mostly stores emails in proprietary formats

Clients with POP3: convert the email data stream to

- Single files

- eml, emlx (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple Mail)

- pst, msg (Outlook)

- Databases

- mbx (Opera Mail)

!The important Outlook Format (msg) is proprietary, can be understood but is sensitive for version changes

!

So there is no real standard format; the RFC #833 standard controls communication but not what is saved. There are simply no guarantees!

But PDF/A offers a full solution!

Complete

- All fonts embedded

- All metadata embedded and defined using an embedded “schema”

- No password protection or encryption

Well-defined

- Device independent color definitions

- Well-defined encodings for all text

- Well-defined and embedded appearance for comments and form fields

No dynamic content allowed

But allowed are:

- External links

- Digital signatures

!

So what are the possibilities?

PDF/A-1

- Doesn’t allow file attachments in the PDF/A file

- Email attachments converted to PDF and appended to the email representation

PDF/A-2

- Allows embedded PDF/A files

- All attachments converted to PDF/A files and embedded in the email representation

PDF/A-3

- Allows embedded arbitrary files

- Attachments can be embedded as original file and/or converted PDF/A files

!

!!

In practice!

Archiving result example

- Email converted to PDF or PDF/A

- Header information used in the PDF and fully stored in the XMP metadata

- Attachments stored as original and as PDF/A together with the original email

Thank you! Questions?David van Driessche CTO, Four Pees - david.van.driessche@fourpees.com