[tex-live] PDF/A-1b compliancy with (pdf,lua)TeX

[Florian Breitwieser]

Hi Reinhard,

> good to know that my assumption was wrong.  I must admit that I only
> compiled the testfiles shipped with pdfx.sty with pdfTeX and sent the
> PDF files to two online PDFA validators.

I also struggled get a PDF/A with pdfLaTeX and pdfx, and it did not
work out in the end.

I changed to a different route - and I am nearly there now - where I
use hyperxmp, which is nice to use and which also supports LuaTeX.
Color profile inclusion (there's a small bug in the original pdfx
code) and glyph management are taken from pdfx. I think these should
work in LuaTeX, too. The code, in the end, is very compact, as
hyperxmp provides higher-level access to metadata writing. It requires
modifications in the package source to write the PDF/A compliancy tag
and other things, but I am in contact with the author to include it.

> Unfortunately everything is time-consuming.  One PDFA validator has a
> nice web interface but the other one accepts files by email and sends
> its results as email attachments.  The latter is more picky, hence I
> can't avoid it though it's quite inconvenient.

True, I also spent a week. In the end, I found a combination I am
quite happy with: pdf-tools online validator [1] and Apache pdfbox
preflight [2]. I did not find the later very much used by other
people, but it is very powerful and sensitive to issues. To be really
useful, also there I needed to modify the code to include the byte
offset, etc, to error messages [3].

There is maybe one more iteration for the LaTeX code, then I can
supply it if you are interested.

Best,
Florian

[1] http://www.pdf-tools.com/pdf/validate-pdfa-online.aspx
[2] http://pdfbox.apache.org/
[3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-1816