Generating PDF/A compliant PDFs from pdftex

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Introduction

This page describes necessary steps to create PDF/A compliant PDFs from pdftex and related issues. When we compile a latex document with pdftex, there can be a few issues that can 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 metadata:
    • 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 the following:

  • input are latex documents
  • tex live 2008 (with includes pdftex version 1.40.9) is used for latexing
  • 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

Let's have a minimal document hello.tex that looks as follows: <geshi lang="latex"> \documentclass{report} \begin{document} Hello, world! \end{document} </geshi>

When we compile it with pdflatex and check for pdf/a compliance, we will get a report like this:Report of checking hello.pdf