[texhax] Anything yet available to produce PDF/A ?

[William Adams]

On Feb 22, 2012, at 5:54 PM, Karl Berry wrote:

>    Acrobat Pro is only used to verify that it's compliant:
>> Acrobat 8.0 for pdf/a validation
> 
> FWIW, I just read in an article from Claudio (Beccari) that this is not
> a reliable way to perform the check.  I trust Claudio won't mind if I
> quote his paragraph:
> 
>  Of course the last step is to check PDF/A compliance with a reliable
>  program, such as Preflight. Please do not trust the information issued
>  by Adobe Reader~X when it opens a PDF file that pretends to be
>  PDF/A-compliant. The information is a wish, in the sense that the
>  statement might be true, but the document has not been really tested in
>  every remote corner of its compliance. So the real message should not
>  be: ``This file is PDF/A compliant'', but: ``This file might be PDF/A
>  compliant''.
> 
> Unfortunately, neither Claudio nor I are aware of any free software tool
> (e.g., Ghostscript-based) that can test compliance.  If anyone else is,
> we'd love to know.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0 is not free, and should be able to adequately check on PDF/A compliance --- if it isn't, upgrade to Adobe Acrobat X Pro:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/acrobatpro_b.html

and if you find a .pdf which claims to be PDF/A, is accepted as such by Adobe Acrobat X Pro, but really isn't fully conformant, file a bug report.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.