PDF/A

[William Overington]

Will Affinity Publisher support production of a PDF/A format document as a choice when exporting a PDF document please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

William Overington

Thursday 7 March 2019

 

[Alfred]

 

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

 

Hello Alfred

Thank you.

I have been trying to find the Feature Requests so as to add support for the suggestion.

PDF/A is what legal deposit libraries are trying to use.

I wonder if an author trying to get software that can produce PDF/A is regarded as very marginal, niche and specialist and that there is reluctance to support it.

It is a very important feature for authors and publishers to have available.

William

 

[Alfred]

18 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I have been trying to find the Feature Requests so as to add support for the suggestion.

The post that I quoted is in the Feature Requests & Feedback forum! Click on the arrow in top right-hand corner of the heading to view the post in situ.

[William Overington]

Hello Alfred

Thank you.

I have now added a link to this thread into that thread.

William

 

[William Overington]

Does anyone know how much extra work would be involved in programming Affinity Publisher to produce PDF/A documents please?

Also, in that Affinity Publisher produces various types of PDF, such as for web publishing and for sending to a printing house and they have vastly different file sizes (much smaller for web publishing), does anyone know which sort of size PDF/A would come out as please?

William

 

[mac_heibu]

As far as I know, the PDF library of „Publisher“ is a licensed 3rd party product. Besides that, I doubt, that a software company will tell you,  „how much extra work“ will be needed to implement a certain feature.

If you read the specs, you will see, that PDF/A is no „special“ PDF, but a standard PDF, following certain rules, which partially differ according to the PDF/A standards (font embedding, no encryption, no compression, no video content, no external references, …, …,)

By the way: There are many online converters like this one https://docupub.de/pdfconvert/ available.

[William Overington]

Thank you.

I have found the following.

https://www.pdfa.org/pdfa-faq/

Regarding the German website to which you provide a link, I found that one can switch the language to English.

William

 

 

[William Overington]

I have just tried the facility to produce a PDF/A document and I have had success!

Looking at the conversion facility's Supported Formats I found that Adobe PDF looked like the only way to go from a publication produced using Affinity Publisher to a PDF/A.

So I decided to try to produce a PDF from Affinity and avoid every restriction that I could. So, I decided no rasterization, no compression of images, PDF 1.4 compatible, embed all fonts and no subsetting and include the ICC colour profile. I did not know what to do about honouring spot colours so I deselected it for this test - maybe that was the wrong approach?

I started a new document in Affinity Publisher.

It is attached.

I then produced a PDF for web and tested it using the vera PDF/A checker.

It gave three errors.

I then processed the PDF through the facility mentioned by mac_heibu and then saved that PDF and then ran that through vera PDF and it passed.

As it happens the facility produces a PDF with the same name and I saved it to a separate folder on my computer.

To try to avoid confusion I am adding the source file and the first PDF to this post and I will try to add the second PDF to a separate post.

William

 

 

test.afpub

test_20190308a.pdf

[William Overington]

Here is the second PDF.

Please note how it is much smaller. I do not know why.

William

 

test_20190308a.pdf

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, William Overington said:

To try to avoid confusion I am adding the source file and the first PDF to this post and I will try to add the second PDF to a separate post.

A better way to avoid confusion would have been (and would still be) to rename the second file before attaching it. 

[William Overington]

I have had the vera PDF/A checker on my computer for some time.

I cannot remember where I got it from.

It was announced in an email and I got it and tried it and got lots of errors with a file produced using PagePlus but I do not remember which file that was.

I will try to find it.

William

 

[William Overington]

Just now, Alfred said:

A better way to avoid confusion would have been (and would still be) to rename the second file before attaching it. 

Well, I was not sure of what effect renaming the PDF file might have on the provenance of the testing.

William

 

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, William Overington said:

Well, I was not sure of what effect renaming the PDF file might have on the provenance of the testing.

Why would a change of name have any effect? The name isn’t internal to the file: it only matters to the filing system.

[William Overington]

As I wrote, I was unsure, so I exercised caution.

Maybe the smaller file size is partly, or even totally, because as a part of the test when producing the PDF from Affinity Publisher I deliberately did not subset the font, just in case. In the event the PDF/A version has the font subsetted.

William

 

[William Overington]

Looking back through emails I think that I got vera as a result of the following that was linked from an email.

https://openpreservation.org/news/verapdf-1-10-released-on-international-digital-preservation-day/

I find that I had problems getting it to install and then I got the following advice as I needed to install Java.

>> Try installing Oracle Java 9 from here:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/javase/index-jsp-138363.html. Once that's done you should be able to double click the installer jar from the installation zip package and all should be good.

To which I replied.

> Yes, I did that yesterday evening and I have got veraPDF working.
I downloaded the offline version of the installer.
Thank you for your help.
I added a shortcut to verapdf-gui.bat on the desktop. This makes use easier.

----

I hope that that is helpful.

William

 

[MikeW]

Your pdfs fail more stringent accessibility checkers. The main failure is the language tag(s) are not set.

[William Overington]

Could you clarify which checker you are using please? When you write "accessibility checkers" is that the same thing as checking for PDF/A validity?

Can I get round that by starting with a PDF made with Affinity Publisher?

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Maybe the smaller file size is partly, or even totally, because as a part of the test when producing the PDF from Affinity Publisher I deliberately did not subset the font, just in case. In the event the PDF/A version has the font subsetted.

That was the first thing which sprang to mind when you mentioned the much smaller size of the version you produced.

[William Overington]

I should have mentioned at the start of this thread that PDF/A is used for archiving, particularly over long time periods.

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

I should have mentioned at the start of this thread that PDF/A is used for archiving, particularly over long time periods.

Given that your OP includes a link to the Wikipedia article about it, you didn’t really need to mention it at all. However, since you’ve decided to mention it, it’s entirely appropriate that you waited a long time to do so!

[Aidren]

I would also like to see the pdf/a formats as well. The PDF/A-1a format is, apparently, fully compliant with ISO standards in the archival world.

Aidren