In the eDiscovery process, there is often the risk of unintentionally altering a file's metadata when it is processed or accessed. Here's an example:
When dealing with dates in Microsoft Word, it is possible for a user to insert a reference to the current date in a document, and set this date to be configured to update whenever the document is opened. This stored date is updated every time the file is opened. When the file is processed for eDiscovery, it does get opened by the processor. As such, this reference to the current date becomes quite useless when you need the original date's information for your review.
In more recent versions of Word, this stored date is shown without update when the document is opened in "protected mode", but unfortunately it's not possible to print or rasterize the document without first exiting "protected mode" - at which point Word will update the date field to the current date. Microsoft Word does not provide a way to disable the update of these fields in contrast to Microsoft Excel, which does.
In order to preserve the cached date, a file processor would first have to decompress the document and modify the raw XML data before opening the document for PDF conversion. Not all Word Documents are XML based, non-XML .docs would require a separate solution.
Though these aren't currently features of GoldFynch, they are planned for a future update.