GhostScript PDF/A conformance

Question

There seems to be an error in the GhostScript PDF/A generation.

When you generate a PDF/A document via GhostScript, when you click on Adobe Reader, there is a Conformance tab which displays:

"Conformance: Standard: PDF/A-1B ISO Name: ISO 19005-1 Status: not yet verified"

It is a hit and miss affair. When you generate the same PDF file via command-line, it also gives:

"The PDF you are currently viewing does not identify itself as compliant with any standard" sometimes

I used command-line:

gswin32c -dPDFX -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOOUTERSAVE -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy0 -sOutputFile=resu.tpdf xxx.ps PDFA_DEF.ps

Any ideas how to make it always show the conformance message instead of non-conformance?

Answer 1

This is a confusing "feature" of Adobe Reader X (and perhaps earlier versions). "Status: not yet verified" makes it sound like Reader could verify PDF/A conformance. However, to verify conformance using an Adobe product, you need Acrobat Pro:

The Standards panel is present in all versions (Std, Pro and even Reader). However, Verify Compliance functionality is only present in Acrobat Pro.

See http://help.adobe.com/en_US/acrobat/using/WS58a04a822e3e50102bd615109794195ff-7b40.w.html#WS58a04a822e3e50102bd615109794195ff-7b3d.w.

So the presence of "not yet verified" in Reader does NOT mean that the PDF/A is not correct.

I don't have Acrobat Pro. It would be interesting to know if, once verified by Acrobat Pro, a document opened in Reader would show as Verified.