PDF/A-1b for long-term storage / PDF Printer

The PDF/A format (PDFA) was designed for long term storage of PDF documents. Government agencies and large organizations are already adopting this standard for storage of documents.

PDF Printer has support for the commonly used PDF/A-1b variant of this standard. This type of documents contain extra descriptive properties and font information. Additional color information is also added to PDF/A documents.

If you compare a PDF/A document to the equivalent non PDF/A document, you will usually see an increase in the size of the document. The increase in size is often related to the inclusion of the color profile. Profiles vary in size from a few kilobytes to megabytes.

There are different software packages on the market that claim that they can validate if a specific document conforms to the PDF/A standard. However, real life examples show that they do not always agree. The PDF Printer will try to make as many of the validators happy as possible. This also means that the default color profile is big compared to others.

One could argue that as long as the document is valid when tested by Adobe Acrobat Preflight module it is good. Adobe is considered the market leader when it comes to PDF documents. You can choose a different and much smaller color profile (ICC) if you wish to validate in the Adobe Preflight module.

Changing the ICC Profile

Since version 10.2 the PDF Printer has an icc setting that allows you to change the ICC profile used when creating PDF/A documents. Two color profiles are shipped with the program and you use the global.ini to set a different ICC profile.

This is an example of a global.ini with a setting that will change the ICC profile to the smaller profile that will validate in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

[PDF Printer]
icc=C:\Program Files\7-PDF\PDF Printer\icc\eciRGB_v2.icc