PDF/A Scanning
Why use PDF/A instead of the standard PDF for scanning?
Well PDF/A scanning provides specifications for creating, viewing, and printing digital documents for long-term preservation. It protects final documents of record as self-contained files, helping to ensure future access to information.
PDF's can be feature rich and create difficulties in preserving information over the long term. For example, they may depend on system fonts and content drawn from outside the files. As technology changes, these external dependencies can cause information to be lost.
With so much important information all over the world being maintained as a scanned PDF, PDF/A was introduced and approved by the ISO in May 2005 to solve the above problem.
Typically, embedded fonts, Device-independent colour, XMP metadata and tagging are all acceptable within a scanned PDF/A, however encryption, links, LZW compression and multimedia are not.
At Technofile we use Adobe Acrobat to certify any files that are scanned in PDF/A format.
You can obtain the Adobe Acrobat white paper on this here.