PdfaPilot

pdfaPilot: Conversion of documents and emails into robust, searchable PDF or PDF/A files
Homepage:	https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdfapilot
License:	Commercially licensed product
Platforms:	Versions available for Windows and Mac

Description

Convert documents and emails into PDF or PDF/A files to make them last a lifetime.

Quoted from the callas homepage:

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Make your documents and emails last a lifetime

In many environments, there are regulatory requirements that all communication regarding specific topics has to be archived for a certain period of time. How long that is can differ widely – from a few years to multiple tens of years.

The format of choice for archiving is defined in the ISO standard PDF/A (PDF for Archiving). This ISO standard defines three different PDF/A versions and callas pdfaPilot can automatically convert all of your documents and emails into the PDF/A flavor required for your purposes. Additional job information (metadata) is fully supported and the solution is configurable enough to let it adapt to your workflow instead of the other way around.

Archiving documents is a critical operation of modern workflows; for that reason callas pdfaPilot has been extensively tested and complies with the ISO standards as verified with for example the Isartor test suite. The fact that the very same technology is used in the de facto standard, Adobe Acrobat, is testament to its quality.

Archiving typical office documents

The best way to have good PDF/A files is to properly create them to begin with. For this, callas pdfaPilot can automatically convert Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher and Visio files into quality PDF files for you. Simply drag them on the document window of callas pdfaPilot Desktop and the conversion takes place in the best possible way.

OpenOffice documents are fully supported too and on Mac OS X Pages and Keynote of course work as well. Using the integrated Adobe engine, callas pdfaPilot even does quality conversion of EPS and PostScript files for you, without requiring Adobe Acrobat Distiller to be installed.

Email archiving

These days, emails are an essential part of business communication in most organizations. Many countries have laws and regulations around the archival of such communication, either to be used in potential future litigation or as part of sound accounting practices.

Because emails are usually handled by email servers with limited storage capacities, there are no guarantees that an email you receive today will still be on the server ten years from now. When you download the email from your server it is possibly converted into the proprietary format of the email client, and there is no guarantee that you will have such a client in the future. In addition, there are attachments to the emails that require a proper viewer for all file formats that may occur here. Luckily callas pdfaPilot lets you store these emails including all attachments in a PDF/A format that will be available and readable many years from now.

But even in environments where such regulatory guidelines don’t apply, there are good reasons to archive emails. In our modern society an amazing amount of business intelligence is captured in emails. Being able to maintain that information in a structured way and in the same format that is used for other documents and being able to efficiently search all of those documents including emails and their attachments efficiently will only become more important.

Handle EPUB and PDF/UA

Thanks to its unique checking feature for tagging structure in a PDF file callas pdfaPilot also offers optimized exporting to PDF/UA, the standard for accessibility. More and more legislation requires documents to be universally accessible for everyone, including people with physical disabilities. As a result, checking against the PDF/UA standard has gained importance for service providers, governments and enterprise customers alike.

But pdfaPilot lets you take advantage of PDF tagging in a very different area as well: The tagging structure can be used in order to automatically create EPUB files from PDF. This PDF to EPUB feature converts PDFs into eBook files that can immediately be used on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets.

System requirements

• Mac (Intel): macOS, version 10.7 or newer, 64-bit-compliant
• Windows:
  • Windows 7 or newer
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer

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Product variants

Desktop, Server, CLI or SDK

User Experiences

• Used by KOST-Val as a validation tool for PDF/A files.