Strasbourg, The European Court of Human Rights has purchased licences for the LuraDocument® PDF Compressor (Luratech’s PDF/A compression and conversion software), demonstrating its intention to implement the PDF/A standard as part of its strategy for ongoing management of case files and adoption of industry standards.
Luratech’s PDF/A conversion software is available to legal and professional service providers in the UK through Blue Car Technologies, who have integrated the product into its Court Management Information System (C.M.I.S) and its OpenText eDOCs Document Management System.
“The Court recognises the importance of the PDF/ A standard and LuraTech’s PDF/A conversion and compression tools will be integrated seamlessly into the Courts Management Information System (C.M.I.S). This will reduce our overall archive storage costs against an increasing case load and allow the Court to guarantee reproduction of the original document content in years to come.” says John Hunter, Head of IT at the European Court of Human Rights.
“There has been a number of direct steps taken towards the PDF/A standard In America and now in Europe, which makes it all the more inevitable that the standard will be implemented in the UK.” Comments Colin Fowle, Managing Director of Blue Car Technologies.
U.S. federal courts recently implemented the prerequisite to file PDF case documents using PDF/A formatting. Although not yet a legal requirement, the PDF/A format is the adopted format of the Council of Europe when filing documents through their Case-file and Document Management systems.
Luratech is a founding member of the PDF/A Competence Centre, thereby giving reassurance that the compressed PDFs produced by its products are the “real” PDF/A format. The collaboration will enable Blue Car Technologies to offer the legal and professional service industry a number of standards-compliant software solutions for validating PDF/A files as well as tools for PDF conversion and compression.
The LuraTech products provide a balanced relationship between compression rate, image quality and performance. Furthermore, the recently released PDF/A version 2 improves the handling of transparent images and logos and provides superior compression quality. The products can be run on multiple-core processor servers meaning they can processes around 200,000 documents in a 24 hour period, far quicker than competitors. OCR (optical character recognition) is included in all products (ABBYY engine), which produces compressed and fully text-searchable PDF/A files.
PDF/A is an ISO* standard electronic document format, which has been developed to ensure total document fidelity and integrity is preserved not only now but far into the future. PDF/A documents can be created from digital sources regardless of the programme or system that originally generated them, including scans taken from hard copies received by mail that need to be converted to a digital format. This is where the standard comes into its own, offering longevity to paper documentation and providing reusable content.
* (International Organisation for Standardisation)