Ghostscript won't convert PDF to PDF/A. Annotation Issue

Question

I'm trying to convert a PDF to PDF/A. At every pass I'm getting the error "GPL Ghostscript 9.19: Annotation set to non-printing, not permitted in PDF/A, reverting to normal PDF output".

The PDF has previously been generated from HTML by wkhtmltopdf. With the error being quite vague I've done some research around PDF annotations. I've confirmed the PDF has no annotations, flattening annotations (though there isn't one) hasn't worked, I tried the -dShowAnnots=false switch. All to no avail. I've also tried it with a variety of different PDFs and I'm getting the same error on them all.

The command I'm using to do the conversion is "gs -dPDFA=2 -dNOOUTERSAVE -sProcessColorModel=DeviceRGB -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o output.pdf /Users/work/Documents/Projects/pdf-generator-service-tests/PDFA_def.ps -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 input.pdf"

I tried creating a basic PDF page from Google's homepage using wkhtmltopdf https://google.com putput.pdf and again, no joy (this is an example of the PDFs I've tried to convert, for people who may want to try and replicate the issue).

Answer 1

I used gs (v9.21) to convert a PDF with annotations set to non-printing (hyperref) to a PDF/A compliant file. Annotations will not be present in the output file but, in my case, that was not an issue.

The command I used is:

gs -dPDFA=2 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceGray -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output_file.pdf input_file.pdf

Notes:

• -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 instead of -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1. The latter does not force gs to elide the annotation while the former does.
• I used -dUseCIEColor because pdfa validation (https://www.pdf-online.com/osa/validate.aspx) failed with an issue related to the color space. This parameter is deprecated but I did not find any other way around this issue. For more details, see Convert PS files to PDF/A via Ghostscript, color space problems

Answer 2

Like KenS said, it's hard to know anything without a PDF to look at but since you're having trouble with the Google home page converted to PDF, I suspect that it's the external links that are causing the problem. Links are annotations and in PDF/A, external links are not permitted. Any link in HTML when converted to PDF will be considered external.

Answer 3

I thought the error was quite specific; PDF/A does not permit annotations to be set to non-printing. You haven't included an actual example of the kind of file causing you a problem, so I can't possibly comment on the presence of any annotations, but I assure you that its not possible to get this message without having annotations.

Since you've already set PDFACompatibility to 1 there's not much else I can say. You could open a bug report and attach the file there, or post a link to one here. Without that I can't say much.

Oh and you don't say which version of Ghostscript you are using, or where you sourced it from. Occasionally packagers break things so it might be worth trying to build from source.

One point; You execute the PDFA_def.ps file before setting PDFACompatibility=1, that's probably not going to work, you'll want to switch those two around. You should set the controls before you do any input or stuff might go awry, trying to change midstream isn't really a good idea.