Generating PDF/A compliant PDFs from pdftex

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Revision as of 17:58, 22 November 2008 by Thanh (talk | contribs) (New page: ==Introduction== This page describes necessary steps and and related issues to create PDF/A compliant PDFs from pdftex. ==Overview== When we compile a latex document with pdftex, there ca...)
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Introduction

This page describes necessary steps and and related issues to create PDF/A compliant PDFs from pdftex.

Overview

When we compile a latex document with pdftex, there can be a few issues that makes prevents the result from begin pdf/a compliant, such as:

  • problems with fonts:
    • font files are not embedded,
    • mismatch of character widths,
    • characters of zero widths,
    • fonts don't have a ToUnicode mapping
  • problems with medata:
    • XMP data not included,
    • XMP data don't match the info in pdfInfo catalog.
  • problem with interword spacing: pdftex don't use space to separate words in pdf output.

The usual way to verify if a pdf file is pdf/a compliant is to use a validating tool. There are a few pdf/a checking tools; the most common one is using the Preflight tools in Acrobat Professional version 8 or newer. In this document, we assume that we are using pdftex versio 1.40.9 (comming with tex live 2008) to create pdfs and Acrobat 8.0 for pdf/a validation. We start by a minimal example, and then move to more complex ones, to illustrate the issues one may encounter when trying to achieve pdf/a compliance.

A minimal example