When you first decide to add signed electronic documents to your workflow the tendency is to want to sign the document in the native format of the creating application. So people often think that they want to sign Microsoft Office files, emails and CAD files. However there are several considerations when it comes to actually deploying the system.
What are retention requirements? If these signed documents need to be accessible in 10 years is the Word document format an appropriate format for archive?
Who will be signing the documents, and where? The availability of viewing tools is critical, as the document will need to be viewed electronically.
These considerations often cause the direction to turn to standard formats for archive. One format that has become very popular in electronic document archiving is the TIFF standard, largely due to its origins in the scanning and archiving of paper documents. TIFF is readily viewable using many applications and has proven to be a durable specification, as has its cousin in the imaging world, JPEG. These documents are easily signed and displayed. Indexing and storing requires using metadata tags as these documents are not inherently searchable.
Text documents have significant advantages for indexing and searching, but raw text lacks the formatting and images that are critical parts of most modern documents.
HTML and XHTML are gaining in popularity. The problem to date has been using restrictions to insure that the document is consistently rendered by the multitude of applications that display HTML.
The newest standard to gain favor is the Portable Document Format (PDF). This specification, developed and popularized by Adobe through its Acrobat family of products, is based on widely adopted Postscript page description language with extensions to support embedding fonts and other information useful to make a truly portable, device independent document format. Adobe released the PDF specifications and the rights to use them royalty free, although Adobe still owns copyrights. They also worked together with the ISO, AIIM and NPES to create the PDF/A format for long term document retention. The PDF references are available from Adobe here, and the PDF/A specification is available from the ISO. More information on PDF/A can be found at the PDF/A Competence Center.
In practice we have found that many organizations are migrating to the PDF standard, for multiple reasons. Native PDF has several advantages over image formats, in that PDFs are readily indexed and searched. However the biggest advantage is the ubiquitous and free Acrobat Reader. The prevalence of this application insures that nearly everyone that looks at a PDF document will see the exact same document. Other important features are the strong document-centric format and integrated support for digital signatures and X.509 digital certificates.
In the future we will have a section on methods for developing esignatures for PDF documents.
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This is an odd set of observations in my opinion. TIFF and PDF are both owned by Adobe. Of course, if you have an imaging system for archival storage of documents, these are reasonable formats.
TIFF is an old format that goes back to old scanning and fax imaging. It’s barely even been updated since the early 1990s. There are very few ways to view a TIFF formatted file, and almost no web browser will display it without special plug-ins, so it’s not particularly useful for online electronic signatures.
PDF is also old, dating back to the early 1990s, so being described as “the newest standard to gain favor” is unusual. It has been updated over time, though, unlike TIFF. PDFs are a fine format for archived documents, to be sure, but they tend to be physically big compared to simpler text formats like XML and HTML. For example, the U.S. Federal I-9 form is 158KB in PDF, but the same document in HTML is only 50KB.
While it is true that HTML rendering isn’t pixel perfect (by any stretch of the imagination!), well formed HTML will render in MANY web browsers created by MANY companies without any issues whatsoever. All file formats have to deal with software issues — after all, a newly created PDF cannot be viewed in an older Adobe Reader, for example, though this hardly means PDF has any issues. Modern web browsers render HTML and CSS very well these days, and certainly render them well enough for nearly any business contract or form. HTML files are dramatically smaller than PDF.
Like PDF, HTML is also easily indexed, and of course can be displayed in web browsers natively and quickly (no PDF downloads, or seeing your PDF document in an Adobe reader “IFRAME” that includes all of its own buttons and navigation that are not native to the web browser.
HTML, being a long time open standard, unlike those owned by Adobe, will surely be viewable long into the future. There are literally billions of pages of HTML available over the Internet, and these are not going away. HTML can be viewed on more than PCs, too, including phones, PDAs, etc. Unlike “hard layout” like images and PDFs, the document can be rendered in different ways very easily, using different dimensions. HTML also is more easily rendered for the visually impaired, allowing fonts to be changed dynamically for bigger print (without the entire document becoming bigger and wider), as well as being auto-read to the blind.
HTML also has the advantage of being human readable “in a crunch.” That is, with reasonably good HTML and CSS, the HTML “document” or contract can be read using a simple text editor fairly well because the markup is basic. Contact law rarely requires that the document be pixel perfect for legal reasons (have you ever read a fax, or worse, a fax of fax?!), and the content of the words is key. Open a PDF in a text editor and you won’t see anything recognizable, but open the HTML equivalent, and you can literally read it.
So, while JPEG, TIFF and PDF are fine, HTML certainly will continue to grow because it is compact, human readable, renderable by many different devices, and of course is ideal for web-based document signing as it’s native to the web browser with full support for data input at the time of signing.