PDF to PDF/A

Prepare a PDF for long-term archiving with PDF to PDF/A

Government agencies, law firms, and anyone submitting a document that must stay readable years from now often get asked for PDF/A. Archival PDF is built so a file looks the same decades later, independent of viewer or color setup. PDF to PDF/A takes a PDF you have and adds what an archive expects to find in it.

Upload your PDF and the tool embeds a color profile as an output intent, plus PDF/A identification metadata marking the file as conformance level 2B. This gives a reader or a digital archive what it needs to display colors consistently and recognize the file as archival. The process does not touch page content, so text, images, and layout stay as they were.

This conversion is best-effort rather than certified. It does not re-embed fonts or flatten transparency, both of which a strict validator can flag, so treat the result as archive-friendly rather than a guarantee it passes formal PDF/A certification. A font not embedded in your original file stays that way.

Before you submit an archived file

• Confirm whether the recipient needs certified PDF/A or an archive-friendly file.
• Check that any custom fonts in your PDF were already embedded before converting.
• Open the result and confirm colors and layout look right on your system.
• Keep your original PDF too, in case a different format is needed later.