How to generate PDF/A and PDF/X?

Question

I have heard about PDF subsets PDF/A (for archival) and PDF/X (for printing). How to generate LaTeX documents like that?

I'm also interested in answers with plain TeX and ConTeXt, and hopefully with both pdfTeX and XeTeX engines.

Answer 1

ConTeXt now supports PDF/X out of the box. You need the latest version of ConTeXt for this to work (that is, the version from TL 2010 does not have this support). This only works with MkIV (that is, luaTeX) and not pdfTeX and XeTeX.

Basically, all you need to do is

\setupinteraction
     [title={...},
      subtitle={...},
      author={...},
      keywords={...}]

and then

\setupbackend
   [format={...},
    intent={...}]

See context wiki for details.

Answer 2

This is not just a question of 'use the right package', as you also have to watch what you do with your input. For LaTeX, take a look at pdfx. For plain TeX, you probably need to look over the LaTeX stuff, code your own bits and away you go! I'm not sure about ConTeXt: undoubtedly it can include the same data that LaTeX can, as ultimately the engine is the same.

Answer 3

to go a bit further, if you perform a full check of a latex document with Acrobat Pro, it looks like there is no way you can avoid messages like:

• "None of the images on this page that need alternate text have it."
• "All of the text on this page lacks a language specification."
• "Text that does not map to Unicode reliably may be read incorrectly by assistive technologies." (for equations and mathematical fonts mainly)

Your lights are of interest to me. Thank you