The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has released part two of the PDF/A standard for the long-term archiving of electronic documents.

The PDF/A 2 standard provides protection against tampering, support for embedding a document's colour information and the ability to ensure that only fonts with unambiguous encoding information are being usedAmong the features it.

The standard's official document title is "Document management – Electronic document file format for long-term preservation – Part 2: Use of ISO 32000-1 (PDF/A-2)."

The first part of the PDF/A standard is based on PDF 1.4; PDF/A-2, on the other hand, is based on PDF 1.7 – the PDF version which has itself become an ISO standard. PDF 1.7 supports a range of improvements un document technology such as JPEG2000 compression, transparency effects and layers, the embedding of OpenType fonts,and provisions for digital signatures in accordance with the PADeS (PDF Advanced Electronic Signatures) standard.

Part two of the standard also offers the possibility to embed PDF/A files into PDF/A-2. This allows groups of documents to be archived coherently as individual documents.

PDF/A-1 will initially remain in effect without limitation, and there is no immediate reason to convert documents that don't require the added functionality of PDF/A-2.

According to Luratech, creator of the LuraDocument PDF Compressor, the PDF/A-2 standard creates a basis for saving documents at 1:1 scale; something which is required in geographical applications, among others.

Because the page limit is now 381 by 381 kilometres, instead of PDF/A-1’s five-by-five metre limit.

In a further improvement, layers can be switched on and off as desired. This is useful, for instance, when needing to display only the black and white layer of a colour document, or to print a file without a distracting background.