PDF/A with Fluent Designer

The Fluent Designer supports PDF/A (Archive) compliance. PDF/A compliance is not enabled by default. PDF/A output is a dropdown option separate from normal PDF output. Generating PDF/A compliant documents requires additional processing, which can slow down the report generation process.

What is PDF/A?

PDF/A is an ISO-standardized subset of the PDF specification that was designed to ensure that a PDF document is self-contained, reliable, and can be accurately rendered in the future. PDF/A compliance requires that all content (including fonts and color information) is embedded within the file, in order for documents to remain consistent over longer periods of time. In addition, PDF/A documents can contain metadata about the document's structure.

The aim of the PDF/A standard is to make sure users viewing the document in the future will see the document exactly as intended, which is essential for long-term digital preservation and archiving purposes. Many governments and public authorities recommend the use of PDF/A, and some even make it a hardline requirement. For example, the Dutch, Swiss and the Danish governments all enforce the use of PDF/A for non-editable documents. In addition, PDF/A is one of the preferred formats for archive institutions such as The Smithsonian, New York State Archives, the National Archives of the Netherlands, The National Archives of the UK and so on.

The PDF/A standard has gone through several revisions (technically known as "parts") since its initial introduction, and each part specifies certain conformance levels. The PDF/A output option in Fluent will produce documents compliant with the commonly-used PDF/A-3b conformance level.