How to convert a PDF to a PDF/A?

PDF/A is an international ISO standard for archiving PDFs. The standard requests strict compliance to its set of rules (like: "embed all fonts", "don't use transparencies", "don't use JavaScript", "no encryption",...).

There are a lot of PDFs out there which claim to be PDF/A, but fail a real smoke test. That claim is just a tag in the file's metadata. That tag can make f.e. Acrobat Reader display a special hint when rendering it.

A check for real compliancy requires some rather expansive commercial "preflight" software. Currently I'm not aware of any Free utility to do that job. See also here for some test results: Isartor testsuite.

You can use Ghostscript to (try to) convert PDF to PDF/A. How to do this is documented here (Update: for newer versions here).

But note: this document was updated only very recently [*]. Previous versions of Ghostscript's Ps2pdf.htm did mis-lead users to run a command that created PDFs claiming to be PDF/A but which failed real smoke tests.

How to convert PDF to PDF/A with Ghostscript:

Here is a commandline:

gswin32c ^
   -dPDFA ^
   -dNOOUTERSAVE ^
   -dUseCIEColor ^
   -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK ^
   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
   -o output_pdfa.pdf ^
   -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 ^
    PDFA_def.ps ^
    input.pdf

[*] Note: The problem lays with the parameter PDFA_def.ps. This is a file you need to edit to suite your needs. Ghostscript ships with a sample of it in its /lib subdirectory. This sample will not work as-is without you editing it. How to edit is inside the sample's comments.


I used the following command to convert PDF to PDF-A:

gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOOUTERSAVE -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=MyOutPutPDF-A.pdf PDFOriginal.ps

If you have a PDF file, first convert it to PS to work with the above code. I tried several times with the PDF file to be directly converted to PDF-A. However, it didn't work.

Here is a way to convert your PDF to PS file:

pdftops PDFOriginal.pdf PDFOriginal.ps

For saving existing Word documents to PDF/A all you need is a recent version of Microsoft Word. For creating from other products that print you can use a free PDF/A creator like the one at www.freepdfcreator.org

If you need to validate that a PDF/A file is compliant, you can use our free service at www.validatepdfa.com

Converting existing PDF files to PDF/A in a lossless way is a bit more tricky and not always possible. Acrobat 9 and 10 can do this. Our business, Solid Documents, also sells a product that does this (and other common archiving functions) for $99: Solid PDF Tools

Tags:

Pdf

Conversion

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