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

[furtonb]

Hi,

Is there any update on this topic?

Another use case which requires PDF/A is to attach documents for bidding on public projects.

Yesterday we were submitting an architectural competition that had larger paper sizes (A1) with a lot of drawings and renderings on them, and we realised that Publisher 2 cannot produce PDF/A. Quite a slap in the face that was overlooked.

I had to subscribe to Acrobat Pro again, as Preview and other free alternatives were destroying the lineworks and hatches.

I get that Serif won’t disclose feature arrival in terms of dates and make commitments, I just wanted to point to how important this feature would be.

Any recommendations on how to convert large and complex PDFs created with Publisher (containing vector PDF drawings from Archicad and ~4K sized renderings, resulting in file sizes in the 3-25MB range) to PDF/A without compromising visual fidelity and legibility other than succumbing to Adobe?

Thanks!

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, furtonb said:

Any recommendations on how to convert large and complex PDFs created with Publisher (containing vector PDF drawings from Archicad and ~4K sized renderings, resulting in file sizes in the 3-25MB range) to PDF/A without compromising visual fidelity and legibility other than succumbing to Adobe?

Have you tried the online converter mentioned by @mac_heibu near the top of this thread?

https://docupub.com/pdfconvert

[furtonb]

@Alfred

Thanks, but I'm not comfortable uploading sensitive material to any website other than the intended one.