AIIM International is developing a standard for archiving Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format files. The standard is called PDF-Archive or PDF/A. According to the draft standard (Adobe Acrobat PDF document):
This standard defines methods for restricting the allowable content and structure of PDF files so as to make them amenable to long-term archival preservation. Archival time-spans may easily extend across many generations of technological advances in hardware and software systems. The intent of this standard is to maximize the ability of future systems to easily retrieve the significant semantic and syntactic content of PDF files. Towards this goal, this standard aims at making PDF/A compliant files as self-contained and self-documenting as possible, encapsulating all resources necessary to form an exact reproduction of the document as originally created.
