Q:
I’m trying to understand the contents of report.xml
I assume that is the initial pass and is after “conversion”.
Assuming that is correct the only remaining error I see in the files are of the type
What does that error mean, and how do I fix it?
Is there someplace I can look up the PDFAxxxxx error codes?
What are the “Refs” numbers?
Also, I’m trying to output PDF/A-compliant documents, but this report lists this remaining issue. How can I make PDF/A Manager fix this last problem?
A:
The e_PDFA codes are explained in section 4.2 of the “PDFTron PDFA Manager User Manual.pdf” document, included in the PDF/A manager download. (It looks like this particular error code is missing from the documentation, which we will need to rectify.)
The “Refs” list refers to object numbers in the PDF document (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/intro.html#pdf_intro). You can view them with low-level PDF browsers like CosEdit (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfcosedit/).
You can fix these errors quite easily by using PDF/A Manager to convert the document to PDF/A compliant formats. See section 3.3 of the user manual document mentioned above for a description of how to convert files to compliant formats.
PDF/A Manager tries to minimize the number of compliance ‘issues’, however it does not guarantee that result will be a perfectly valid PDF/A. In some cases this is not technically feasible without significant loss of information. The same applies to any other solution — no one can guarantee 100% valid PDF conversion without resorting to rasterization or similar tricks (which would not be acceptable for most users).
Re: error codes, PDF/A Manager should produce a more descriptive description for each code. For example:
So e_PDFA1101 means that the stream is using LZW compression (which is not allowed).
You can map error code to the spec by prefixing the error code with 6 (since everything important in PDF/A spec is in Section 6). For example the above code maps to 6.1.10 Filters (first statement). Unfortunately because the spec was going under several revisions, and was further tweaked in PDF/A 2 & 3 the mapping is not always 100% accurate, but it can point you in the right direction.