Generating PDF/A-1b compliant documents using pdfx and pdfLaTeX

Question

There are several discussions on the web on how to generate PDF/A-1b compliant documents.

One approach can be found on http://support.river-valley.com/wiki/index.php?title=Generating_PDF/A_compliant_PDFs_from_pdftex which is implemented as far as I can see in the pdfx package.

I created a minimal test.tex file:

\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage[a-1b]{pdfx} 
\begin{document} 
Hello, world! 
\end{document}

From what I understand, I need to place metadata in a separate file called test.xmpdata:

\Title{PDF/A-Compliance}
\Author{Ada Lovelace}
\Org{TeX University}
\Keywords{PDF/A}

I compile test.tex using pdfTeX 3.1415926-1.40.10-2.2 (TeX Live 2009/Debian).

For validation of PDF/A-1b compliancy, I use jhove and a PDF export from LibreOffice as a positive control.

jhove -m pdf-hul test.pdf

However, jhove laments

ErrorMessage: Lexical error
  Offset: 16530

So my test.pdf file does not seem to be PDF/A compliant. Could you please give me hints on additional diagnostics to run in order to pin down the problem?

Answer 1

See updated solution

https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/535849/50129

OUTDATED

Generating PDFA-1b compliant documents is not possible with the default pdftex. There is a minor bug in pdftex resulting in non-compliant EOL markers. There is a bug report from 2011 about this problem which successfully resolves the issue. You can find it here:

http://sarovar.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=4341&group_id=106&atid=493

There is also a file attached to this report: http://sarovar.org/tracker/download.php/106/493/4341/10821/verify_this_sample.zip

It contains instructions on how to patch pdftex to generate PDFA-1b compatible files. The package also contains a patched version of pdfx. Unfortunately, these changes did not made it into the code base yet.

Answer 2

I had to validate a document through jhove, and I managed to do it using pdftk on the PDF that was produced by pdflatex. I simply used the command

pdftk MyDocument.pdf output ValidatedDocument.pdf

I hope it can help you!

Answer 3

I don't know if this is a right answer to the question, but it might help someone who wants to generate a PDF/A (especially the 1b version for archives) from a LaTeX project.

I tried the pdfx package, even though it helps to reduce the number of validation errors, veraPDF sill complaining about so many others. The problem is LaTeX alone cannot check all the requirements (for example the transparency of the graphics).

After some research I found that Ghostscript can be used to convert a PDF to PDF/A (see this thread), but the validation was not always successful as well. Some versions does not even work. Sometimes it works but the resulting PDF will have some issues (for example links does not work, metadata are removed, etc).

The idea then is to use the pdfx package, compile the project using pdfLaTeX then run Ghostscript on the resulting PDF and use a program like ExifTool to fix the metadata issue. This gave me good results (at least on my LaTeX thesis).

I wrote a simple script to automate the above process. Although I am not sure if it will work for every LaTeX project, but I hope it will help someone in the same situation. The installation process as well as the source code are hosted on github: latex2pdfa