How to use ghostscript to convert PDF to PDF/A or PDF/X?

Question

Is there a way to use ghostscript to convert PDF to PDF/A or PDF/X? I know it can be used to convert PDF to images, but I don\'t know if it can be used to convert PDF/A. Wha

Answer 1

@danio, @imgen: Even recently released documentation pages on PDF/X (standardized Prepress requirements) and PDF/A (standardized Archiving requirments) generation were quite misleading. (Your link pointed to a v8.63 release.) In the end, it suggested that running the example commandlines using the sample PDF*_def.ps would already generated valid PDF/A and PDF/X files.

But, they do not!

Here is one of the sample commands, which by itself is correct:

  gs \
    -dPDFA \
    -dBATCH \
    -dNOPAUSE \
    -dNOOUTERSAVE \
    -dUseCIEColor \
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
    -sOutputFile=out-a.pdf \
     PDFA_def.ps \
     input.ps

The output file will declare itself to be PDF/A (and most PDF viewers would happily go along with this), but the output file fails all real compliance tests.

The fix is easy: you need to edit your sample PDFA_def.ps (for PDF/X: your PDFX_def.ps) files to match your environments. These required edits were not clearly spelled out in older documentation versions, and the provided command suggested it would work out of the box.

Especially in case of PDF/X you MUST specifiy a valid ICC profile to use.

See also the updated documentation (current SVN trunk version) about this:

• http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/trunk/gs/doc/Ps2pdf.htm#PDFA

Answer 2

Hope this answer helps others coming from Google with the same problem:

To convert from PDF to PDFA-1b or PDFA-2b, you can use Ghostscript. I suggest you use the latest version (9.19 today).

Install it

In Mac OS, you may prefer to use Homebrew:

brew install ghostscript

In Linux, some distros bring a much older version (rhel7 sports 9.07). To download a fully independent modern one-file-only ghostscript, download it directly from the site:

wget https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/download/gs919/ghostscript-9.19-linux-x86_64.tgz

If the link above is broken when you try it 20 years from now, please refer to ghostscript.com and search for download section. Download the binary version, don't go for the source, unless you know what you are doing.

In Windows, I cannot help you, but if you manage to install it, the following commands will also work, if you substitute the location of files and gs executable.

Command line

gs-919-linux_x86_64 -dPDFA=1 -dNOOUTERSAVE -sProcessColorModel=DeviceRGB -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o output_file.pdf /path/to/PDFA_def.ps -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 input_file.pdf

In Mac gs-919-linux_x86_64 will be simply gs.

Please note that output_file.pdf and input_file.pdf must be changed to the names of the output file (the converted file) and the input file (the file to be converted). /path/to/PDFA_def.ps is your copy of the file PDFA_def.ps.

-dPDFA=1 is for PDFA-1b.

-dPDFA=2 if you want PDFA-2b.

What is PDFA_def.ps?

PDFA_def.ps is some sort of template ghostscript uses to create a PDFA file. The tricky part is that, for some reason, ghostcript comes with a non-working file.

You'll need to edit PDFA_def.ps and include the path to a valid ICC (color profile) file. Download a good color profile from Adobe:

wget http://tutankhamon.acc.umu.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/vendor/adobe/adobe/iccprofiles/win/

Inside that zip, find a file called AdobeRGB1998.icc, put it somewhere and put the path to that file INSIDE you PDFA_def.ps file.

Here is a version of PDFA_def.ps, change PATH_TO_YOUR_ICC_FILE to the path of you AdobeRGB1998.icc.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/weltonrodrigo/19df77833f023fbe1572168982e4b515/raw/ea86e87379d14120d7ff26f6f235ac7eeb5f5dd5/PDFA_def.ps

Answer 3

This is to convert a pdf document (not pdf/a) into pdf/a: gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=output_filename.pdf input_filename.pdf

Hope this will help some one!

Answer 4

Please note that current answers are not completely correct. You can define which level of PDF/A you want, resulting in different behaviors of the program. This one is correct:

gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sColorConversionStrategy=UseDeviceIndependentColor -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=2 -sOutputFile=output_filename.pdf input_filename.pdf

Please note my change from sdPDFACompatibilityPolicy to dPDFACompatibilityPolicy. Change it to a higher number to get other versions. 1 is good if you don't need DOCINFO. Furthermore we use the option UseDeviceIndependentColor to avoid validating issues.

If you change options here, you will most likely get a non compliant PDF/A (even if it stated differently). You can check your pdf/a here: https://www.pdf-online.com/osa/validate.aspx

Answer 5

If you're using Windows and want to create PDF/A-1b documents explicitely (PDFCreator has an output option for PDF/A-2b but not for PDF/A-1b), you just can enter the parameters Artur described above into the ui settings of PDFCreator without the ones for the document names. Start PDFCreator, choose the printer menu, then go to settings. Now, choose 'Ghostscript' from the settings list on the left side. Under 'additional ghostscript settings', enter as follows :

-dPDFA|-dBATCH|-dNOPAUSE|-dUseCIEColor|-sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK|-sDEVICE=pdfwrite|-sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1

Click on 'Save', then print something from MS Word or any other application you want using the PDFCreator - it will be created in PDF/A-1b.

Greetings, Fritz