PDF 1.7 and beyond

A paradox from Euan Cochrane: PDF 1.7 may follow the ISO standard, but not all PDF 1.7 files follow the same standard.

Conversations about data on CDL site

The California Digital Library has launched a new site, Data Pub, “to explore the landscape of digital data.” Suggested topics for discussion are data publication, data sharing, data archiving, data citation, open data, and open science.

Although the invitation to discussion is general, there doesn’t seem to be a way for non-CDL people to register so they can comment. This may be because they’re still getting things started.

Apache ODF toolkit

The Apache Software Foundation has made its first release of the ODF Toolkit. This version is called 0.5-incubating, so I imagine it still has rough edges. Officially, “incubating” means that “the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.”

This could be useful to software that validates or extracts metadata from Open Document Format files. It includes ODFDOM 0.8.7, which has been around for about a year. Anyone want to write a module for JHOVE or JHOVE2?

PDF/A post on FTL

Today on Files That Last I have a post on “PDF/A for the long haul.” It’s directed at the end user or administrator, not at the formats geek or preservation specialist, but might be useful to link to when you’re explaining what PDF/A is good for.

Article on formats and protocols

Here’s an interesting and thoughtful article on “textuality” in formats and protocols.

Thanks to Andy Jackson’s Twitter feed.

IPRES proceedings

The IPRES proceedings for 2011 are now available.

IPRES 2012 will be in Toronto, making it the most convenient one for Americans in years. It will be September 30 to October 5 (which is when I was planning to be in Germany … just can’t win),

The future of e-book formats

An article with some interesting thoughts: “Will There Ever Be A Universal, MP3-Like Standard For E-Books?”

Personally, I’d say PDF (not Epub) is to e-books what MP3 is to music files: A widely adopted, universally recognized format that no one’s entirely happy with but satisfies most people’s needs.

New on “Files that Last”

Here’s the first post with “real content” on FTL: Metadata: What’s it all about?”

Two file analysis tools

Two US National Archives file analysis tools are now available for general use. Both are open-source Java applications.

The File Analyzer and Metadata Harvester “functions like a digitization Swiss army knife. The application allows a user to analyze the contents of a file system or external drive and generates statistics about the contents of the contained directories. The application can be used to generate checksum values to ensure the bit-level integrity of files after they have been copied to a new device. After a collection of files have been converted from one digital format to another, this application can verify that there is a one-to-one match of before and after files.”

The Video Frame Analyzer “is used to analyze technical properties of individual frames of a video file in order to detect quality issues within digitized video files. Within video files, the quality issues that might arise vary from collection to collection. This application allows the user to configure the tests to be performed against a file and to tailor those setting to a specific collection.”

Thanks to Robin Wendler for the information.

W3C link roundup

DOM4 draft updated.
First draft of CSS device adaptation.
Ink Markup Language (InkML) recommendation.
Widget Packaging and XML Configuration recommendation.
XSL-FO 2.0 updated.
Namespaces Module and Selectors Level 3; First Draft of Selectors Level 4.
CSS Fonts Module Level 3 Draft.