Solutions · Document Intelligence · PDF/A conversion

Any PDF in. Archival PDF/A out.

Converting existing PDFs to PDF/A is where archival projects usually stall: fonts are not embedded, colours are device-dependent, the file is encrypted, the metadata contradicts itself. LM-Kit ships PdfAConverter: one call that repairs the document, embeds and reconciles every font, calibrates colour through ICC profiles, strips prohibited constructs, rebuilds XMP metadata, and rewrites the result as PDF/A-1b, 2b, or 3b. Fully on-device.

PDF/A-1b / 2b / 3b 99.5%+ veraPDF conformance 100% local

PdfAConverter

Static one-call API. File, stream, byte-array, or attachment input. Sync and async.

Font repair

Non-embedded fonts replaced by embedded equivalents with widths reconciled glyph by glyph. Layout never shifts.

Guaranteed output

Documents the rewrite cannot repair are rebuilt from page renders with an invisible text layer. Still searchable, always conforming.

What conversion repairs

The full ISO 19005 checklist.

The converter repairs the document in place before rewriting it, so text, vector graphics, and layout are preserved. Rasterization is a last resort, not the strategy.

Fonts

Embedded and reconciled

Every font is embedded. Missing programs are replaced by metric-compatible equivalents, declared widths are reconciled glyph by glyph, and encodings are normalized so extracted text stays intact.

Colour

Calibrated colour

Device colour spaces are calibrated through embedded ICC profiles and an sRGB output intent. Transparency is handled per conformance level.

Prohibited

Constructs removed

JavaScript, launch actions, embedded multimedia, and external references are stripped, as the standard requires for self-contained archives.

Encryption

Encrypted sources

Pass the password and the converter opens protected sources. The output is always unencrypted; PDF/A forbids encryption.

Streams

Compression re-encoded

LZW streams and non-conforming JPEG 2000 images are re-encoded to compliant equivalents without touching conforming content.

Metadata

XMP rebuilt

PDF/A identification metadata is written and the XMP packet is synchronized with the document information dictionary, a classic validation failure.

Levels

A-1b, A-2b, A-3b

Target the level your archive requests via PdfAConversionOptions.Level. The default is PDF/A-2b, the level most archives ask for.

Report

Full accounting

Every conversion returns a report: features detected, fixes applied, raster triggers, unresolved violations, page count, and whether encryption was removed.

Fallback

Three policies

Rasterize (default) guarantees a conforming output by rebuilding unrepairable documents from page renders with an invisible text layer. Fail throws instead, ReportOnly ships the best-effort rewrite plus the violation list.

Server

REST endpoint

The same converter ships in LM-Kit Server as POST /lmkit/v1/pdf-to-pdfa, with the conversion report mirrored in the JSON response.

Real conversion code

Three working pipelines.

One call converts a PDF to PDF/A-2b and returns a report of everything that was detected and repaired.

ConvertToPdfA.cs
using LMKit.Document.Pdf;

// One call: repair fonts and colour, strip prohibited constructs,
// rebuild metadata, rewrite as PDF/A-2b.
var report = PdfAConverter.ConvertToFile("invoice.pdf", "invoice_pdfa.pdf");

Console.WriteLine($"Conforms:      {report.Conforms}");
Console.WriteLine($"Pages:         {report.PageCount}");
Console.WriteLine($"Fixes applied: {report.FixesApplied}");
Measured conformance

99.5%+ veraPDF conformance.

A PDF/A claim only counts if an independent validator agrees. Across a large benchmark corpus of real-world PDFs, more than 99.5% of converted documents pass veraPDF conformance validation.

Related capabilities

PDF/A plus the toolkit.

PDF toolkit

Merge, split, render, search-highlight, unlock, and inspect PDFs with the same library.

PDF toolkit page

Scans to PDF/A

Coming from images instead of PDFs? ImageToSearchablePdf turns scans and multipage TIFFs into searchable PDF/A in one pass.

Searchable PDF generation

Document conversion

Markdown to PDF, HTML to Markdown, email to PDF, and the full conversion catalogue.

Conversion page

OCR

The invisible text layer used by the raster fallback is driven by the same on-device OCR engines.

OCR page

Archive-ready PDFs. No cloud.

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