Defining the Format

Next, for those documents, you must decide what output format you want to send to the content management system. This should be a format which your end users can retrieve and view easily. It must also be a format which supports all anticipated uses of the documents you are archiving.

A popular choice is Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It is a cross-industry standard format that provides high fidelity output, cross-platform support, and is universally viewable. Documaker can produce these types of PDF files:

• Text PDF files, where the text in the documents is searchable and can be set to allow copying to other documents.
• Image PDF files, which can be generated by print to disk processes or document conversion using a printer metaphor. These PDF documents contain images or pictures of the pages, similar to scanned documents. They are generally much larger and less useful than text PDF documents.