Document File Formats
What is the best format to keep a given document in?
Source of document: paper
TIFF: this is a scanner output format and can be compressed
Some people are promoting the use of PDF's for document stoage.
What are the trade offs?
- PDF is a doc format, TIFF is more of an image format. Programs to
view PDF's are a little more user-friendly and widely available.
- Both standards are pretty much open and universal.
- Sizes?
- Can I store both image and text data in a PDF? Dang, where's that PDF of the Acrobat PDF Bible?? Where are the specs for PDF format?
Source of document: digital
This is mostly dictated by the format of the source file, but I am inclined to think I should settle on a few standards and transcode everything into those formats.
audio: mp3 (yes I know it's a copyrighted format but it's ubiquitous)
photo: jpeg or tiff - General rule: do not transcode TIFF to JPEG, which is lossy.
movie: I have so few movies right now that this is not relevant yet.
text files: I don't want to store formatted text files for long term access in MS-Word format! What format does OO use?
Plain text files should stay that way.
email: I think email should be stored into a MySQL database when it comes in and purged automatically after about a year unless I tag messages for archiving. This goes for both sent and received email. I might want to automatically tag/archive mail with certain addresses.
