Forum How do I...?

How do I create a PDF/A-1a compliant PDF using prince XML?

Dirklectisch
Is it possible to create PDF's that have a level 1 compliance with the PDF/A ISO standard? The website doesn't mention support for the standard at all. But it's crucial to my decision to use Prince as a PDF generator.

Thanks for you help.
mikeday
Last time I checked, PDF documents created by Prince were almost but not quite compatible. Do you have Acrobat Professional installed? It can tell you if a PDF complies with various profiles of the spec, and if not, what needs to be changed.
Dirklectisch
I don't have Acrobat installed. But fixing the issues that Acrobat mentions would not be a bullet proof approach to ensure that all PDF's generated by Prince are PDF/A-1a compliant, right? Some incompatibilities might be content driven.
mikeday
True, the only guaranteed solution is to study the specification in detail then add a new command-line argument to Prince to force compliance with the spec, which might require rejecting some input documents depending on their content.
Dirklectisch
Well, are there any plans to build such functionality in the near future? Some of my clients require that their PDF's are created in the PDF/A format. Thanks again for your help.
mikeday
Does your customer specifically require PDF/A-1a, and not just PDF/A-1b? This will require us to support tagged PDF in Prince, which is definitely on the roadmap, but isn't likely to see daylight before next year.
Dirklectisch
Several of my clients require PDF/A-1a. We might be able to postpone the project for a few more months but not a whole year. So are we talking Q1 2010 here or more like the end of 2010?
mikeday
Our roadmap is flexible, and we like a challenge. Perhaps we can take this over to email (mikeday@yeslogic.com) and discuss what kind of documents you need to convert, and how much work it will take for us to support them.
stonor
I'm very interested in this too. Danish government has made an agreement with local governments that all non-editable documents published on web sites and sent to citizens and companies should be distributed in PDF/a1 - ref (in Danish): http://vtu.dk/filer/aabne-standarder/bilag58.html).

We are evaluating different PDF renderers for governmental clients and it would be a shame to settle with less visual appealing PDF's than those Prince XML can generate in order to comply with this.

So +10 from here to add this feature.

/Anton
notaesystems
I need this too My project concerns United States District Court forms and all federal courts will be requiring PDF/A shortly (some maybe this year) for electronic filing of documents with the courts.
mikeday
Good news! We are working hard on this and should support PDF/A-1b and PDF/A-1a this year.
a.vaneck
Is there any news about this project. We are in a urgent need for some of our customers to implement this
mikeday
Prince 9 supports PDF/A-1b, and we are currently testing PDF/A-1a, which includes tagged PDF.
loremipsum
Hi Mike,

Any updates on this yet?

Thanks
mikeday
Not yet, still working on it. If we knew tagged PDF would be this much work to add, we would have built it in at the beginning! :)
tinebak
Any chance it's ready now? :)
mikeday
Not yet. :(
mikeday
It's ready now! Try the latest build, which supports Tagged PDF via the PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-3a profiles.

Edited by mikeday