Here’s a new YouTube video of mine illustrating some ExifTool techniques for figuring out why files behave strangely. It also serves as a teaser for my new course on ExifTool.
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Almost all the published books on digital preservation are academic writing for a very limited audience. My own Files that Last wasn’t intended for a tiny audience but ended up that way. The chances look better for Abby Smith Rumsey’s upcoming When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future.
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My latest Udemy course, Managing Metadata with ExifTool, is now live! The list price is $36, but with the link here it’s just $12 through the end of February. OK, to tell the truth, Udemy’s payment structure practically mandates setting high prices and then discounting heavily, but this introductory rate is the best one you’ll see for a while.
As far as I can tell, this is the only publicly available tutorial on ExifTool which covers the topic so thoroughly. Here’s the outline:
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What would you say about data storage with a lifetime of billions of years? I’d say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary support. The University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center says it’s developed digital storage that will last for 13.8 billion years at 190° C — or at least that’s how it came out in the report. Peter Kazansky says “we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race.” (And the death of the Sun?)
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This post may be illegal in Indonesia. It includes the code point sequence U+1F468 U+200D U+2764️ U+FE0F U+200D U+1F48B U+200D U+1F468, which renders as the emoji 👨❤️💋👨 or “man kissing man.” According to a Time article, the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Informatics is “asking” Facebook to block the use of “gay” emoji. Failure to comply could mean the Negative Content Management Panel (George Orwell would have been impressed!) will block Facebook in Indonesia.
Emoji have generated several controversies already, but this is the first I’ve heard of a government censoring code points. It’s couched in terms of “sensitivity,” “respect,” and protecting children.
An article from the PDF Association points out the pitfalls in searching PDF documents. Even if a document has actual text in it, rather than being a scanned image, it might not hold the text in the natural character ordering. PDF is a format for rendering a document’s visible appearance, and it isn’t so good at holding semantic content. Chunks of text can be stored out of sequence as long as they render in the right place.
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Preservica has introduced a catchy campaign warning people against letting their files become “eX-files.” It includes a downloadable PDF, “Safeguarding your Vital Long-term Electronics Records.” (You have to provide your email address to download it, and you may have to turn off ad blocking temporarily to see the form where you do that.)
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We hear a lot about “high-res audio” these days. Sound digitized at 192,000 samples per second must be a lot better than the usual 44,000, right? Well, maybe not.
We can hear sounds only in a certain frequency range. The popular rule of thumb is 20 to 20,000 Hertz, though there’s a lot of variation among people. Not a lot of people can hear anything higher than 20,000.
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The 3-D printing industry has been moving toward 3MF as a standard file format. It’s an XML-based format that claims to offer extensibility, interoperability, and freedom from the problems of other formats. The specification includes an XSD schema. I’m no judge of how suitable it is for 3D modeling, but yes, it is extensible. In fact, it’s designed with a relatively lean core model, so additional features can be added as extensions.
A recent Fortune article, “Why These Big Companies Want a New 3D File Format”, discusses 3MF from a business standpoint.
The old STL format, based on tessellation, is widely used, but it’s been criticized for generating huge files and lacking features.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, an e-book to bring the message of digital preservation to the broader geek world.
Mad File Format Science 
3D PDF and PDF/E
It must be a surprise to most people, but you can represent three-dimensional objects in PDF, in spite of its strictly 2-dimensional imaging model. It turns out there are two ways to do it, with the older U3D and the more modern PRC. What makes them possible is PDF’s annotation feature, which allows capabilities to be added to PDF, and the Acrobat 3D API. Full support of these features requires implementation of at least PDF 1.7 Extension Level 1, or to put it in application terms, Acrobat 8.1.
The PDF/E standard for engineering documents, aka ISO 24517, includes U3D but not PRC. A PDF/E-2 standard is currently in development and is expected to include PRC. PDF/E, like the other slashes of PDF, is a subset of the PDF standard (version 1.6), so obviously it’s possible to do 3D work without reference to it. It’s intended for cases where long-term retention or archiving is important. This suggests some affinity with PDF/A, which is specifically aimed at archive-quality documents, and the PDF Association, which is heavily involved in PDF/A, has recently started a PDF/E Competence Center. Oddly, the competence center says that PDF/E-1 “does not address 3D,” though other sources say PDF/E does reference U3D. Perhaps this is a matter of what really constitutes “addressing” 3D as opposed to just acknowledging it.
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