[gs-devel] status of PDF/A support

[Ludovic Aelbrecht]

(Apologises if you already received this email - it didn't show up in
the archives, so I subscribed to the list and am resending now.)

Hi all,

I hope this is the right mailing list for this kind of questions; it
seemed like the best match I could find on
http://www.ghostscript.com/mailman/listinfo.

I'm wondering about ghostscript's support of PDF/A.

According to bug #690046 "Ghostscript doesn't produce valid PDF/A-1B
files", there's now a patch to make ghostscript support PDF/A-1B. I
saw in 8.64's "changes.html" that this patch is in the latest release.
Does this mean that ghostscript 8.64 will always generate valid
PDF/A-1B PDF's, if used with the commandline params seen in bug
#690046:

gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \\
	-dPDFA \\
	-sOutputFile=MY_OUTPUT_FILE_TO_BE_IN_PDFA.pdf -c .setpdfwrite \\
	-dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -r600 \\
	-dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true -dMaxSubsetPct=100 \\
	-dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false \\
	-dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode
-dMonoImageFilter=/CCITTFaxEncode \\
	-dEncodeColorImages=true -dEncodeGrayImages=true
-dEncodeMonoImages=true \\
	-dDownsampleGrayImages=false -dDownsampleMonoImages=false \\
	-dProcessColorModel=/DeviceCMYK -dUseCIEColor \\
	MY_ORIGINAL_POSTSCRIPT_FILE.ps $tempname.ps

There are several other commandline examples in this bug, but they
don't look at lot like this one - is there one which is more correct?

Are there any params which will *always* be correct, no matter what
the original postscript file looks like, or are there any params which
depend on the original postscript file?


Further, while my understanding of PDF/A is rather limited, it seems
to me like A-1B is only a subset of A-1A. Any plans to support
PDF/A-1A in ghostscript? If so, is there an ETA for this?

Sorry about all the questions...

Many thanks and best regards,

Ludovic