Can anybody recommend a command line pdf to pdf/a tool (for either linux or windows)?

[Mark London]

Hi - I would like to find a command line tool, that converts pdf files to the pdf/a format.   I've tried ghostscript, but it's pdf/a formatdoesn't produce pdf/a files that can be verified as pdf/a, using tools like verapdf.

I've written a local website that allows our users to upload pdf files, which then gets sent to dataverse.  I would like to avoid having to manually force users to create pdf/a versions, using Acrobat.

If there is another solution, I would greatly appreciate knowing!  Thanks. - Mark 

[Alex Garnett]

I'm not sure you'll do better than ghostscript for CLI tools ... 

What's your gs syntax look like? I think I've used this to make PDF/A before...

$ gs -dPDFA -dNOOUTERSAVE -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceRGB -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o $2 -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 /usr/share/ghostscript/9.10/lib/PDFA_def.ps $1

[Mark London]

Alex - Thanks for pushing me to re-examine using ghostscript.  I was using 9.10 on ubuntu, which is the highest version available for the version of ubuntu that I'm running.   But I just tried 9.20 on fedora, 
and the output verified fine.  Same exact .icc file.   I'll have to figure out if the issue is with the version of ghostscript I'm running, or whatever.    I actually thought I tried 9.20 on fedora Friday evening, without success.   But I never should be working on computers problems, at that time of the day and week, obviously.  - Mark