A seminar on PDF/A will be held in Washington, DC, on March 26. The registration fee is $125. PDF/A is a restricted subset of PDF designed to promote long-term data viability for the purpose of preservation.
The press release contains a bizarre statement:
“At this time, the use of PDF/A is not mandatory in the United States,” said Betsy Fanning, Director, Standards and Member Services, AIIM, “however, that is changing.” “We are learning of draft legislation that is being debated that will make the use of PDF/A mandatory for preserving electronic documents.”
Congress has neither the right nor the technical competence to order us to use particular file formats. Hopefully this was an out-of-context quote about the government’s own use of PDF/A, though even there legislation requiring a specific subset of a specific format would be very strange.
Mad File Format Science 