PDF/A? What is that exactly?

PDF/A is a standard of the International Organisation for Standardization - in short: ISO - which describes the usage of the Portable Document Format (PDF) for the long-term archiving (A) of electronically saved documents.

ISO-19005-1 - Document management Electronic document file format for long-term preservation - Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1)

This standard guarantees a future usability/readability of your PDF/A documents.

The requirement for a later reproducibility of PDF/A-documents is that the document contains all important information. This comprises all visible texts, fonts, as well as charts (rasters, vector) and much more. References to external sources, which are required to display the PDF/A-document, are not allowed.

The standard specifies two levels of conformance:

PDF/A-1a - Level A conformance in part 1 - precise visual reproducibility, as well as display of text according to unicode and content structure of the document
PDF/A1b - Level B conformance in part 2 - simply precise visual reproducibility

The current version of our product n2pdf complies with all requirements of the ISO-standard (19005-1:2005).

By supporting the stricter conformance PDF/A-1a, n2pdf provides all possibilities for the secure storage of your Notes documents to be archived.

It is activated by calling the function "N2PDFSetOption" with the parameter "N2PDFOPTION_PDF_PDFA_MODE".

Optional the following values can be set:

N2PDFVALUE_PDFA_NONE	not PDF/A-conformant file (Default)
N2PDFVALUE_PDFA_LEVEL_A	PDF/A-1a-conformant file
N2PDFVALUE_PDFA_LEVEL_B	PDF/A-1b-conformant file

PDF/A? What is that exactly? And what can it be used for?

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