TWAIN Working Group and PDF Association Announce PDF/raster

PDF/raster provides the portability of PDF while offering the core functionality of TIFF. Bitonal, grayscale

The TWAIN Working Group(TWG) and the PDF Association, both not-for-profit organizations designed to foster universal public standards, today announced the joint publication of PDF/raster 1.0, a subset of the PDF specification suited to the needs of resource-constrained imaging systems.

PDF/raster is a strict subset of the PDF file format. It was designed for storing, transporting and exchanging multi-page raster-image documents, especially scanned documents. PDF/raster provides the portability of PDF while offering the core functionality and support of TIFF. Bitonal, grayscale and RGB images are supported. Compression options include JPEG, lossless CCITT Group 4 Fax and uncompressed.

PDF/raster was created via a collaboration between the TWAIN Working Group, which originated the PDF/raster concept, and the PDF Association, which provided PDF technology expertise and perspective as well as means of communicating with the PDF software industry to ensure a diverse range of relevant viewpoints was represented. PDF/raster is part of the TWAIN Working Group’s new TWAIN Direct specification — the first zero-footprint, cloud-based version of its royalty free open standard protocol that allows applications to talk directly to document scanners without the need for vendor specific drivers.

PDF/raster provides image-only file format guidelines that can be implemented across a wide range of scanners. It is designed to be efficient to implement on any scanner, to be easy to parse by applications, and to be 100% compatible with PDF and PDF-consuming applications. More information ….