Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability
> Or those of us who use it for engineering type drawings that need a paper trail.
We use the files that come out of our software (think .dwg sort of thing), along with all the input data and some PDF renditions for easy graphical preview, all cryptographically signed and archived along with a copy of the exact software that was used to produce them (version and configuration), as is standard in our industry. The estimated lifetime of our documents is five to twenty years and it is expected that we are able to replicate the exact output at any time during that period (there will be at least one other independent entity with the same requirement on their identical copy of the data).
PDF alone would just show you a visual representation of the result but not how you did get there, for that you also need the input data and the operations applied to it.
Of course, your requirements may vary.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
