Retention is a legal duty measured in decades; most PDFs are not built to survive one. Convert, prove, and seal the archive on your own infrastructure.
Between the retention mandate and the folder of PDFs sits a set of quiet failures that only surface years later, when nobody who caused them is around.
Four steps, two battle-tested engines, and an output an auditor can verify without trusting you.
02
PdfAConverter repairs fonts, colour, and metadata, then rewrites as PDF/A-1b, 2b, or 3b.
03
PdfAValidator, a separate engine, re-parses the output and judges it rule by rule.
04
Signatures, RFC 3161 timestamps, and LTV make authenticity verifiable for decades.
The scenario decides the form: an archiving service every department calls, or archival built into your own records software.
Serve it
OCR, PDF/A conversion, signing, timestamping, and LTV as REST calls any system can make: the scanner workflow, the DMS, the retention job. Authenticated, audited, and scaled beyond one machine when the backlog demands it.
Embed it
Records software, DMS vendors, and line-of-business .NET applications ship conversion, validation, and signing as typed calls in their own process, offline included.
The properties an archivist and an auditor ask about first, stated plainly.
Two engines
Conversion and validation share no verdict path, so a Compliant result means the record conforms, not that one tool agrees with itself. Benchmarked at 99.9% veraPDF-verified conformance.
Sealed
Signatures with timestamps and LTV embed the material verification needs, so records verify long after the signing certificates expire.
Unmetered
No per-page fees and no billing connection, unlike metered cloud document services; a million-page migration is a weekend of compute.
Convert, prove, and seal: as REST calls to the server, or typed calls in your own process.
The archival chain as two endpoints on LM-Kit One.
# Convert to archival PDF/A (repair-first).
curl http://your-server:5189/lmkit/v1/pdf-to-pdfa \
-H "Authorization: Bearer your-server-token" \
-F "file=@record.pdf"
# Seal the conforming output.
curl http://your-server:5189/lmkit/v1/pdf-sign \
-H "Authorization: Bearer your-server-token" \
-F "file=@record.pdfa.pdf"Convert, validate with the second engine, then sign, in process.
using LMKit.Document.Pdf;
var converted = PdfAConverter.ConvertToBytes("record.pdf");
var report = PdfAValidator.Validate(converted.Data);
if (report.Verdict == PdfAValidationVerdict.Compliant)
{
File.WriteAllBytes("record_pdfa.pdf", converted.Data);
PdfSigner.Sign("record_pdfa.pdf", "record_sealed.pdf", signingOptions);
}The pipeline composes documented capabilities you can inspect on their own.
Conform
The repair-first converter and its adversary, the independent validator.
How the two engines workSeal
PAdES signing, RFC 3161 timestamps, and LTV for decade-scale verification.
How signing worksDigitize
Scans gain the text layer that makes an archive searchable and citable.
How OCR worksSeparate
Batch scans split into individual records at their semantic boundaries.
How splitting worksFile
Each record routes to its retention class before it enters the archive.
How classification worksRelated
The intake-side use case: checked on arrival, archived with evidence.
The monitoring use caseEven on-premises containers from cloud document services typically require a metering connection to run, and fully offline tiers sit behind commitment plans. This pipeline runs on your hardware with no billing connection, no page meter, and no minimum volume.
By a second, separate engine. PdfAValidator re-parses the converted file from scratch and judges it against the ISO 19005 rule catalog; it shares no verdict path with the converter. Across a 3,200+ file benchmark, 99.9% of converted documents also pass independent veraPDF validation.
Yes. OCR gives scans a searchable text layer, multipage TIFFs convert straight to searchable PDF/A, and semantic splitting separates batch scans into individual records before conversion.
Long-term validation. Signatures are timestamped through your TSA and the document security store embeds the certificates and revocation data verification needs, so a record proves its integrity long after the original signing certificates expire.
Private Document Intelligence