An Open Preservation Foundation webinar, “Putting JHOVE to the acid test: A PDF test-set for well-formedness validation in JHOVE,” will be held on November 21, 10 AM GMT (that’s 11 AM in Central Europe and a ludicrous 5 AM or earlier in the US).
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This XKCD cartoon showed up in my Twitter feed more times in one day than any previous one, for reasons that should be obvious.
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Libtiff is still offline at remotesensing.org, but there’s a mirror of the source available on GitHub. I held off on mentioning it in this blog till Bob Friesenhahn confirmed it’s reliable.
My article on “File Format Analysis Tools for Archivists” is up on LWN.net.
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Today’s XKCD comic comments on digital preservation in Randall Munroe’s usual style.
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I’ve now got a Facebook page on Mad File Format Science. I’m really not enthusiastic about Facebook at all, but it seems that it should be part of my Web presence.
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3D printing is an exciting new technology, but the formats to choose from are an alphabet soup.
A call for “PDF 2.0” or an “Analytical File Format.” The description is vague, but it sounds like something analogous to the Semantic Web for documents.
BW64, a new RIFF-based audio format. The article describes it as a “3D” format, but more significantly it’s a metadata-rich interchange format that supports really big files.
And just for bitter laughs: I need a ‘file’ format.”
I just came across caniuse.com, where Alexis Deveria maintains information on browser support for various Web features. This looks like a nice resource on how widely formats are being adopted.
Not many people are brilliant writers and also have the technical knowledge to comment on file formats intelligently. When it does happen, it’s worth reading. So I recommend to you Why Microsoft Word Must Die by Charles Stross.
I’ve been on a digital preservation panel with Stross, and he can talk as expertly on the subject as I can. When it comes to Word, he knows a lot more about the format than I do, and he can demolish it more eloquently than I could even if I had the same level of knowledge.
The little-known potential of SVG
Today on Twitter I came upon an article, “SVG Has More Potential,” by Mike Riethmuller. He points out that SVG is more than just “scalable vector graphics,” and he demonstrates that its images can be responsive.
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