Generating PDF/A compliant PDFs from pdftex

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.