Background briefing–Portable Document Format
The PDF file format dates from 1991. Here's a quote from Adobe's website about the format: it can capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machines. The emphasis is clearly on view and print. What about analysis?
There's an ISO standard that applies to PDF documents, assuring us that no single vendor has a lock on the technology. The standard has a focus on specific technical design, user interface or implementation or operational details of rendering. The presence of a standard doesn't make the document file any more readable or useful as a long-term information archive.
What's the big problem?
The Wikipedia page summarizes three technologies that are part of a PDF document:
A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the page layout and graphics
Font management within the document
A document storage structure, including...
