Convert to PDF/A — Free Online Tool

PDF/A is the ISO 19005 archival standard for PDFs that must remain readable decades from now — a strict subset of regular PDF that mandates self-contained files (every font embedded, no external dependencies, no JavaScript, no audio/video, no encryption). Government agencies, courts, healthcare providers, and large enterprises increasingly require PDF/A for any document that goes into long-term retention. Our converter supports the three most-common conformance levels. PDF/A-1b (released 2005) is the strictest and most-widely-mandated — required by US courts (CM/ECF), German government agencies (BMI), and most other state archives. PDF/A-2b (2011) adds support for JPEG 2000 images and transparency, useful for image-heavy documents. PDF/A-3b (2012) permits embedding arbitrary attachments (XML, CSV, source files) alongside the PDF, popular for invoice retention where both the human-readable PDF and the structured data need to live together. The conversion runs Ghostscript with the appropriate /PDFA flag, embeds all fonts that are subset-only, removes prohibited features (JavaScript, transparency in -1b mode, encryption), and produces a file that can be validated against veraPDF (the reference PDF/A validator). If the input contains features that cannot be converted (e.g. a font that cannot be embedded due to licensing), we surface a clear error rather than producing a non-conformant file.