Standard PDF documents can contain external dependencies, interactive scripts, and proprietary font links. If those dependencies disappear 10 years from now, the document may not render correctly. PDF/A was created to eliminate this risk.
Why Standard PDFs Fail Over Time
A standard PDF can reference system fonts that exist only on the creator machine. If opened on another computer lacking those fonts, the viewer must guess font substitutions, altering line breaks and page numbers.
Furthermore, standard PDFs can contain password protection, flash objects, or external URL links that break document independence.
Key Rules of the PDF/A Standard
To achieve PDF/A compliance, a document must adhere to strict archival mandates:
- 100% Embedded Fonts: All fonts and glyph sets must be embedded directly into the file.
- Device-Independent Color: Color spaces must be defined using standard ICC color profiles.
- No Active Content: JavaScript, launch actions, and executable scripts are completely prohibited.
- No Passwords or Encryption: Archival files cannot be locked with proprietary passwords.
PDF/A Conformance Levels (1a, 1b, 2b, 3b)
PDF/A is divided into versions and levels: PDF/A-1b ensures visual fidelity preservation, while PDF/A-1a adds structural XML tagging for screen readers and search indexing. PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3 support JPEG2000 compression and embedding external attachments like XML invoices.
When Should You Convert to PDF/A?
Use PDF/A whenever submitting legal filings, government grant applications, academic theses, medical archives, or compliance records required to be preserved for 5 to 50+ years.
How to Actually Produce a PDF/A File
PDFixel does not currently output PDF/A. Real conformance requires embedding an ICC output intent profile, guaranteeing every font is fully embedded, and writing XMP metadata that identifies the conformance level — none of which our tools do today. Any tool that claims to make a file "PDF/A" without doing those three things is only renaming the extension.
These applications do produce genuine PDF/A output, and all of them run on your own machine:
- LibreOffice (free): its PDF export dialog has an Archive (PDF/A) option, with a choice of conformance level. The most practical route if you do not own Acrobat.
- Microsoft Word: when saving as PDF, the options dialog includes an ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A) checkbox.
- Adobe Acrobat Pro: converts an existing PDF to PDF/A and reports exactly which rules a file breaks before converting.
- Ghostscript (command line): supports PDF/A output for scripted and batch archival pipelines.
- veraPDF (free): the industry-supported open-source validator. Conversion tools disagree with each other, so validate the result rather than assuming it passed.
Where PDFixel does help is preparing a document first. PDF/A forbids encryption, JavaScript and several interactive elements, so a file carrying those will fail conversion — remove the password with Lock / Unlock PDF, and strip JavaScript, interactive forms and stale metadata with Compress PDF. Then run the conformance conversion in one of the tools above.
Summary
PDF/A exists to guarantee self-contained digital permanence: fonts embedded, colour defined independently of any device, and nothing dynamic that could stop rendering years later. For legal filings and archival records, convert with a tool that produces true conformance, then validate the output — and clean the source file of passwords, scripts and forms before you start, because those are the most common reasons a conversion fails.