PDF/A

[Ben]

Hi all –

This is a little off-topic from big data, but for those who are
interested:

If you followed the recent emails about a slight problem with
unclickable links in the PDFs for Macs, the primary problem was with
PDF/A mode. According to a little web research, PDF/A documents (“PDF
for Archiving”) cannot rely on information from external sources (such
as hyperlinks). They should be self-contained.

For those running Windows and Microsoft PowerPoint, you can find an
option for this when converting to PDF. After choosing the "Save
as..." option for PDF, the new window that pops up has an options
button. Under options, there is an option for "ISO 19005-1 compliant
(PDF/A)".

Deselecting this option made the file okay for my Adobe Reader on my
Mac, meaning that it opened in regular mode (it did not try to read
the file in PDF/A mode) and the links were clickable. From what I
found online, PDF/A might be required by some agencies if you need to
store the PDF long-term... some differences are (for PDF/A) required
tagging, images can not use transparency, audio and video are not
allowed, fonts must be embedded, and such things.

Anyhow, PDF/A compliance will be followed by the Adobe Reader on Mac
and might be worth knowing about if you have content that prevents the
document from being self-contained (such as clickable hyperlinks).

Ben