File formats

The file format most commonly used for storing electronic documents today

This format was developed by Adobe and it is now an open standard: ISO 32000-1:2008.

When using PDF in digital archiving, it is essential that the PDF files preserve all the information necessary to reproduce the document exactly as written. For this purpose, a special standard has been developed called PDF/A. It is a specialized version, which has restrictions on many PDF features. For example, it is not allowed in PDF/A to store just references or links to the fonts that are used in the document. The actual font must also be embedded in the pdf file, to ensure that the document will always look the same when viewed or printed on different devices.

PDF/A Verified

When you use PixEdit software for scanning, converting and archiving your electronic documents, you can be assured that they are stored according to the current PDF/A ISO standard.

• More about PDF

Before PDF, the most commonly used format for electronic documents was TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). This format was originally created by Aldus, and it was used mostly in the publishing industry which required a high quality on scanned material. The format is now owned by Adobe

JPEG is a format commonly used by photographers but also by scanner manufacturers. With JPEG, one can only store one page per file, so this is not a very good format for digital archiving

The Techsoft Document Format is a file format for scanned documents developed by PixEdit (formerly Techsoft). Like the well known TIFF format, it can store multiple pages in the same file. But it can also store several image layers for a page, each layer having a unique color.

It is useful when capturing and archiving electronically architectural and engineering drawings, maps, etc, which consists of several drawings made on transparent paper.