DocsCorp, a leader in PDF integration technology and productivity software for law firms globally, announced today the release of its PDF/A Validation tool, which will be part of the latest pdfDocs Desktop release at ILTA 2011 in Nashville, TN.

The PDF/A Validation tool will test a PDF document or a folder of PDF documents for PDF/A compliance. This allows you to test any PDF document created from any PDF creation software. A simple right-click on a document and selecting the PDF/A Validation option launches the validation tool. If a document fails the compliance test, a detailed summary report is produced listing errors. The errors can be corrected by outputting the document from DocsCorp’s pdfDocs Desktop application, which can produce PDF/A compliant documents.

“It is important to verify PDF/A compliance at two different stages of the workflow” says DocsCorp President, Dean Sappey. “First, documents you receive from external sources need to be checked since not all PDF creation tools produce PDF/A documents that comply 100% with the PDF/A standard. Second, documents need to be tested as the final step in the production process. A valid PDF/A document can be invalidated as a result of editing or inserting external links etc. into the document. In both cases, these invalid PDF/A documents may still display in Adobe Reader as PDF/A documents.”

PDF/A for long-term document archiving
The PDF/A standard was developed to ensure that electronic documents are accessible and viewable long into the future. A key PDF/A requirement is that the document is 100% self-contained. This means that everything required to print or view the document is contained within the document: fonts, color profile information as well as metadata must be embedded in the document. Moreover, the PDF/A document cannot rely on external content or sources such as multimedia or scripting. Nor can the document be secured (encrypted) in any way.

PDF/A is becoming a key regulatory requirement in many countries and industries. In the United States, the Federal Courts have adopted the PDF/A standard for the electronic filing of case documents while in Europe governments and energy companies are increasingly requiring archived documents comply with the standard. To learn more about PDF/A standard specifications, please request a copy of our recent whitepaper on PDF/A.

PDF/A Competence Center
DocsCorp is a member of the PDF/A Competence Center, which was established after the publication of the ISO 19005 (PDF/A) standard in 2005. It is a non-profit association of more than 110 organizations and individual experts from 20 different countries dedicated to promoting the exchange of information and experience in the area of long-term archiving of documents.