Stephen P. Levenson
Stephen Levenson has been a member of the Washington, DC-area Acrobat user group for the past two years, and active with Acrobat and PDF for about eight years. In his role as Special Assistant (CTO) to the Federal Judiciary, which serves the nation's 200 trial and appellate courts, he's been heavily involved with a wide variety of issues concerning the adoption of PDF into the legal process.
After the federal courts adopted PDF for electronic case filing and management, requiring virtually all documents submitted to U.S. courts to be stored electronically in PDF, Levenson and others realized a need for ensuring that archived court files will remain easily readable for generations, despite future changes in technology. The solution: A slimmed-down version of PDF with a limited set of only those tags and features needed to preserve long-term access and readability. For example, PDF/A contains text, raster images and vector graphics, but encryption and executable scripts are not permitted.
Levenson serves as chairman of the resulting PDF/A (PDF for Archiving) Committee that began meeting in 2002. The group's efforts were successful — the PDF/A ISO Standard was published on September 28, 2005. Part 1 of PDF/A — based on PDF specification v. 1.4 — is complete, but work continues on part 2 covering PDF 1.6.
Federal Judiciary
www.uscourts.gov/
Acrobat Case Study: U.S. Federal Courts
www.adobe.com/epaper/features/federalcourt/pdf/us_courts.pdf
PDF/Archive Committee
PDF for Archiving (PDF/A)
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