PDF/A Delphi

[ABlock95]

Hi,
I want to create a PDF/A file..
How is this possible and what do I have to do.

My Save Procedure look like this :

procedure TfrmPreview.SavePDFVPE(aFileName: string);
begin
if FileExists(aFileName) then
DeleteFile(aFileName);
Rep.PDFALevel := VPE_PDF_A_LEVEL_1B;
Rep.AddColorProfile(
'GTS_PDFA1',
'sRGB_IEC61966-2-1',
'Custom',
'http://www.color.org',
'sRGB_IEC61966-2-1',
'sRGB_IEC61966-2-1'
);
Rep.WriteDoc(aFileName);
MessageDlg('Liste wurde in Datei ''' + aFilename + ''' archiviert', mtInformation, [mbOK], 0);
end;

With this validator : http://www.pdf-tools.com/pdf/validate-pdfa-online.aspx I've got the following Error:

Validating file "Test.PDF" for conformance level pdfa-1a
XML line 6:61: Input is not proper UTF-
Bytes: 0xE4 0x74 0x69 0x67.", 1
The key MarkInfo is required but missing.
The value of the key N is 4 but must be 3.
A device-specific color space (DeviceRGB) without an appropriate output intent is used.
The document does not conform to the requested standard.
The document doesn't conform to the PDF reference (missing required entries, wrong value types, etc.).
The document contains device-specific color spaces.
The document's meta data is either missing or inconsistent or corrupt.
The document doesn't provide appropriate logical structure information.
Done.

I Hope you can help me.

[IDEAL Software Support]

"Validating file "Test.PDF" for conformance level pdfa-1a"

You are validating for PDF/A-1a, but VPE is restricted to PDF/A-1b, see your own code:

Rep.PDFALevel := VPE_PDF_A_LEVEL_1B;

[ABlock95]

There is almost the same result when validating as PDF/A-1B.

Validating file "Test3.PDF" for conformance level pdfa-1b
The key Metadata is required but missing.
The value of the key N is 4 but must be 3.
A device-specific color space (DeviceRGB) without an appropriate output intent is used.
The font ArialMT must be embedded.
The font Arial-BoldMT must be embedded.
The document does not conform to the requested standard.
The document doesn't conform to the PDF reference (missing required entries, wrong value types, etc.).
The document contains device-specific color spaces.
The document contains fonts without embedded font programs or encoding information (CMAPs).
The document's meta data is either missing or inconsistent or corrupt.
Done.

[IDEAL Software Support]

For the following errors, we have no explanation:
- The key Metadata is required but missing.
- The font ArialMT must be embedded.
- The font Arial-BoldMT must be embedded.

When you set PDFALevel = VPE_PDF_A_LEVEL_1B then VPE will automatically write the Metadata dictionary and embed all fonts that are used in a document. For further investigation, why or how these validation errors occur, please contact us through our support e-mail for in-depth analysis.

Regarding the validation error: "The value of the key N is 4 but must be 3." We confirm that this is a bug, which will be fixed.

Up until now we used the Preflight module of Adobe Acrobat Professional v9.5.5 to validate the created documents for PDF/A-1b conformance. It reported that our documents are 100% fine.

After googling around right now, we found out that there are several validation tools, which work more or less precise. None of the tools is catching all errors at present, and all of them do also create false positives. The PDF/A standard is heavyweight. It seems the Preflight module of Adobe Acrobat Professional has been updated in a more recent version, which shall work better now.

"A device-specific color space (DeviceRGB) without an appropriate output intent is used."
This is a follow-up errror of "The value of the key N is 4 but must be 3."

The other errors are follow-up errors of the previous errors.

The validation tool found also another error ("number out of range of 2^15-1") for a document that we created.

To summarize:
We need to fix two errors, (1) The value of the key N is 4 but must be 3 and (2) number out of range of 2^15-1.
The first error should be fixed easily, the second error will be fixed, too, but it is ridiculous, because every PDF Reader will be able to use bigger floating point numbers (at least 4-byte floats, so the numeric range is 3.4E +/- 38). Therefore the numeric range error will very likely never be a "real" problem.

For the metadata and font-not-embedded error, please contact us directly by e-mail, because we have absolutely no idea, why this occurs on your side. Please provide some sample source code that makes the problem reproducible.

[IDEAL Software Support]

This issue has been fixed with VPE v7.10.