Annotate PDF/A

Discussions about annotation support.
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TimG
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 10:15 am

Annotate PDF/A

Post by TimG » Tue Mar 24, 2020 8:23 pm

Hello,

when we annotate a PDF/A document with gdviewer and validate the resulting document for PDF/A compliance the result is N/G.
Is it not possible to have PDF/A compliant pdf document with annotations created by gdpicture?
Maybe i am missing something here...

Thanks in advance,
Tim

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Fabio
Posts: 173
Joined: Thu Aug 27, 2020 9:57 am

Re: Annotate PDF/A

Post by Fabio » Fri Aug 28, 2020 2:08 pm

Hello Tim,

The PDF/A specification also states some requirements for a conforming PDF/A viewer, which must:
-ignore any data that are not described by the PDF and PDF/A standards;
-ignore any linearization information provided by the file;
-only use the embedded fonts (rather than any locally available, substituted or simulated fonts);
-only display using the embedded colour profile;
-ensure that form fields do not change the rendered presentation and are rendered without regard to the form data;
-ensure that annotations are rendered consistently.

By the way, there are multiple PDF/A formats, the PDF/A format is based on ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7), as was PDF/A-2. Analog to PDF/A-2, the PDF/A-3 standard also defines three conformity grades:
-PDF/A-3a is concerned with accessibility.
-PDF/A-3b is concerned with visual integrity, i.e. the consistently indentica display of the document.
-PDF/A-3u facilitates the searchability of texts and the copying of Unicode text for digitally created PDF documents and those scanned using optical character recognition (OCR).

That's why you will face some issue using this format for annotations.
The best way to have annotations in a PDF/A format is to make annotation, use a custom save using SaveAsPDF with a PDF Conformance parameter set at a PDF format. After that, you are able to convert your PDF to PDF/A using this part of code: https://www.gdpicture.com/blog/pdf-to-pdf-a-converter/

Hope it helps!

Fabio de Rose
Solution Engineer

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