I’m developing a paperless workflow for my home and office. I want to save all my documents in PDF/A-1b archival format so I will be able to open them for years to come. The PDFs should be searchable, meaning they contain not only images of documents, but strings of text. This allows the documents to be indexed so I can quickly find documents when I type in Windows Explorer’s search box.
There are basically three types of documents that need to be archived:
- Paper documents. These must be scanned and, in order for them to be searchable, have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applied. I’ve found OmniPage 18 Standard to be pretty good at this, except for the annoying bug that white-on-black text (often used in column headings of printed documents) disappears.
- Non-PDF electronic documents like emails, web pages, etc. These already have text; they just need to be converted to PDF/A. I’ve already blogged about using CutePDF to print these to PDF/A.
- PDF documents. Once you opt out of paper statements, your bank, credit card company, telephone company, and utility will give you links to PDF files for download. Your tax software probably saved a PDF file too. You could re-print these to PDF/A using CutePDF, but I chose to write a batch file to quickly convert an existing PDF to PDF/A using Ghostscript. This batch process is the subject of this article.
Set up the Batch Components
Caveat This approach should create valid PDF/A documents, but even among experts, there is some disagreement about the PDF/A standard. Use this approach at your own risk. If you have Adobe Acrobat Professional, you can use its “pre-flight” validation to check the output. Or you may want to try a free online validator like the one at PDF-Tools.com or the one at intarsys.de (German). For more background on the process, see this this superuser article and this Ghostscript bug report.
The underlying technology for this batch file is the same as for the CutePDF process, so if you have already followed the other post, you can skip the identical steps.
1. Download the GNU Affero-licensed version of Ghostscript 9.07 here. I found that the 32-bit version works fine even under 64-bit Windows 7. Install Ghostscript to the default directory, C:\Program Files (x86)\gs\gs9.07. At the end of the install, go ahead and let it Generate cidfmap for Windows CJK TrueType fonts.
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2. Create an empty folder on your C: drive called C:\GS_PDFA (Ghostscript PDF/A).
3. Go to Control Panel > System and Security > System. Click on Advanced system settings. Add C:\GS_PDFA to end of the Path statement (System environment variable):
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
4. Download
and unzip it into C:\GS_PDFA. This will give you three files:
pdfa.cmd – the batch file
PDFA_def.ps – the prefix file for Ghostscript conversion to PDF/A
PDF_ShowBookmarksPanel.ps – a Postscript instruction to tell a PDF reader to show the Bookmarks Panel when opening the document
Note that PDFA_def.sys is the same file described in the CutePDF post, so it’s okay to overwrite it.
5. Locate the path to Ghostscript’s gswin32c.exe on your system. pdfa.cmd assumes it is in C:\Program Files (x86)\gs\gs9.07\bin\. If it is somewhere else, update line 45 of pdfa.cmd to point to the correct path.
6. Download the Adobe ICC profiles here. An ICC profile describes a “color space.” We’ll use the simplest one, Adobe RGB (1998). From the downloaded zip archive, extract AdobeRGB1998.icc to the C:\GS_PDFA folder. Again, this is the same file used in the CutePDF post so it’s okay to overwrite it. (You can use a different profile, e.g. sRGB_IEC61966-2-1_no black_scaling.icc from www.color.org; you’ll need to modify PDFA_def.ps accordingly.)
That’s it! You’re now ready to convert PDF files to PDF/A.
Use the Batch File
Since the batch file is in your path, you should be able to open a command prompt anywhere on your system, type pdfa <filename>, and watch it convert the file to PDF/A. Some notes and advanced usage:
- Do not type the .pdf extension on the input parameters. Just type the file name.
- If the file name contains spaces, enclose it in quotation marks.
- The batch program will rename the input file to .old.pdf and create the PDF/A as .pdf. You can delete the .old.pdf file(s) if you are satisfied with the new PDF/A document.
- You can concatenate up to five input PDFs into one output PDF/A. Separate the input file names with spaces.
- When conversion finishes, the PDF/A output file will open in the program on your computer that is registered for viewing PDF files (e.g. Adobe Reader).
- To set the Initial View of the PDF to show the Bookmarks (outline) panel, set the last parameter to -sb (show bookmarks). The input file must already contain bookmarks. Bookmarks will not work properly when concatenating files because bookmarks copied from later files will point to incorrect page numbers.
- Type pdfa by itself to see some usage notes.
Usage
pdfa file1 [file2^|-sb] [file3^|-sb] [file4^|-sb] [file5^|-sb]
Usage Examples
1. If you have a PDF utility bill, open a command prompt where the PDF file resides and use this command:
pdfa “Utility Bill”
Output
Utility Bill.pdf – the PDF/A document
Utility Bill.old.pdf – the original PDF document
2. If you have a credit card statement with two reconciliation reports to attach, use the following command:
pdfa CCstatement recon1 recon2
Output
CCstatement.pdf – the combined PDF/A document
CCstatement.old.pdf
recon1.old.pdf
recon2.old.pdf
3. If you have a tax return that includes bookmarks, use the following command:
pdfa “Tax Return” -sb
Output
Tax Return.pdf – the PDF/A document, should open with bookmarks panel
Tax Return.old.pdf