PDF/A and searchability at the Federal Ministry of Justice

Application requirements

The Austrian justice ministry receives PDF documents via electronic channels (local authority offices, electronic legal exchanges) every day. However, the searchability of these documents was not technically feasible. The aim of the project was the conversion of incoming documents to PDF/A-1b format, as well as text recognition. In the long term, the present requirement to submit documents in the PDF 1.4 format should be tightened to the PDF/A-1b format and the conversion to PDF/A-1b should give way to a validation.

Customer benefits

Thanks to the provision of PDF Tools AG's 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter and ABBYY’s OCR engine as central services, each document can now be converted to PDF/A and made electronically searchable across the justice system. The PDF/A Converter’s Java API allowed the BRZ to integrate the product into its systems quickly and easily.  ABBYY offers a high character recognition rate even when the resolution of incoming documents is mediocre, enabling the automated electronic processing of the texts contained in the documents.

Implementation

In-house tests have shown that the combination of the 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter with the ABBYY OCR engine provides the best solution for the Federal Computing Centre (BRZ).  The main requirements were product stability, a high PDF/A conversion rate and a high OCR engine character recognition rate. Moreover, the tools had to be scalable in order to manage the expected large quantities of data.  The Austrian justice system generates thousands of PDF documents every day through various methods. These files arrive via many different channels and must be processed correctly. Together with ABBYY, PDF Tools AG’s 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter was able to fulfill all requirements.