The resulting PDF seems to be conform to PDF/A even without the -dNOOUTERSAVE option, although less fonts are embedded (maybe someone can explain the difference). Without this option the resulting file is smaller (even smaller than the original in my case), but degradation in image quality can be noted. If the resulting file is too big you can omit the -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress option. (You might need to add before gswin64c the complete path, which for me was C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.22\bin\ - the same for pdf2ps, in this case the path for me was C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.22\lib\) Gswin64c -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dNOOUTERSAVE -sColorConversionStrategy=UseDeviceIndependentColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceRGB -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=destination.pdf temp.ps
The only way that worked for me on Windows 10 was a slight modification of soham's answer (which for me was working but with errors): So a simple way to test if the PDF meet their true requirement of self-containment is to transfer the PDF and view it from another (preferably offline) computer and ensure that everything appears as it should. They just expressed this requirement rather cryptically (And badly) as being that it had to be PDF/A. It's likely that the only reason they specifically request it is so they can be sure that all the content will be "there" when they open it. Since there aren't really any tools to test if a PDF is PDF/A, it's a safe bet that just like you, your university also has no way to test that the document you send them is PDF/A. * Use of standards-based metadata is mandated. * Colorspaces specified in a device-independent manner. PostScript standard fonts such as Times or Helvetica. * All fonts must be embedded and also must be legally embeddable for * JavaScript and executable file launches are forbidden. font programs and hyperlinks).Ĭompatibility include: * Audio and video content are forbidden. Ie it is not permitted to be reliant on information from external sources (e.g. Microsoft Office 2007's ' Save as PDF' tool saves in PDF/A format.Ī PDF/A document is just a PDF document that uses a specific subset of PDF that is designed to ensure it is 'self-contained'.
How to edit is inside the sample's comments. This sample will not work as-is without you editing it. Ghostscript ships with a sample of it in its /lib subdirectory. This is a file you need to edit to suite your needs.
Note: The problem lays with the parameter PDFA_def.ps. How to convert PDF to PDF/A with Ghostscript:
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 do this is documented here ( Update: for newer versions here).īut note: this document was updated only very recently.
You can use Ghostscript to (try to) convert PDF to PDF/A. See also here for some test results: Isartor testsuite. Currently I'm not aware of any Free utility to do that job. Acrobat Reader display a special hint when rendering it.Ī check for real compliancy requires some rather expansive commercial "preflight" software. That claim is just a tag in the file's metadata. There are a lot of PDFs out there which claim to be PDF/A, but fail a real smoke test. The standard requests strict compliance to its set of rules (like: "embed all fonts", "don't use transparencies", "don't use JavaScript", "no encryption".).
PDF /A is an international ISO standard for archiving PDFs.