Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Intelligent Information Management (IIM) Share: There are literally thousands of file formats available – which can lead to lots of confusion when trying to select the best file format for your business applications. Different file formats work better to meet certain business requirements, and selecting the wrong format can cause issues for organizations, their customers, their legal team, etc.To help make this type of decision easier, we’ve outlined some very common file formats used in almost every organization. We’ll look at each of these in a bit more detail to help you compare them and ultimately choose the file format that will best fit your needs.Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)What is PDF? PDF has been around since 1993 as a way to share rich documents, including formatting, links, and images. Over the years, the format has been updated a number of times; its proprietary nature has resulted in significant issues with backwards compatibility.In 2005, Adobe produced a subset of PDF, the PDF/Archive (PDF/A), which was standardized as ISO 19005. The purpose of PDF/A is to provide a stable format suitable for archiving, in part by prohibiting features that change the look of the document such as active code or font linking. The intent is that this should make PDF/A suitable for long-term preservation where such efforts are directed to faithfully reproducing a digital document in the future. This standard is regularly updated.In 2008, Adobe went further and made the PDF Specification a standard: ISO 32000. Adobe has also produced other specialized PDF formats, including PDF/Engineering, PDF/X for prepress digital exchange, and PDF/UA for universal accessibility.Considerations for Choosing PDF: PDF is a widely used format for a variety of applications. PDF supports multiple pages and a variety of content types within a single PDF. PDF is also natively supported in almost all web browsers through the ubiquitous PDF Reader. Many scanning and content creation applications can output directly to PDF.Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)What is TIFF? Tagged Image File Format, or TIFF, is a graphical format presenting the document as a digital copy of the original using raster images. It is an ISO standard. It supports many different compression formats, particularly lossless ones – that is, all of the original data remains present in the file. This can result in significantly larger file sizes compared to other approaches.Considerations for Choosing TIFF: TIFF was the most common format found in digital imaging
Add Comment