1. Designing Pixel-Perfect Reports in Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence
  2. Reference Information
  3. Generate PDF/A and PDF/X Output
  4. Generate PDF/A Output

Generate PDF/A Output

PDF/A is a variation of PDF file format designed for the long-term archiving of electronic documents. Some governments and standards organizations require PDF/A to ensure preservation of documents. A PDF/A file is a PDF file viewable by PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader, but the PDF/A file must follow additional requirements specified in the ISO standard. These requirements specify both required objects and features not supported for long-term archiving. You can generate the PDF/A-1A, PDF/A-1B, PDF/A-2A, or PDF/A-2B variation of the PDF/A standard.

Requirements and Limitations

PDF/A output has specified requirements and limitations.

Limitations and requirements for generating PDF/A output:

  • Supported template types: RTF, FO, XPT, and XSL.

  • Font requirements: By default, all fonts in the template are replaced with Albany fonts in the output. To use a different font in the output, specify the font mappings in the report configuration. If Albany fonts aren't available in the JVM font directory, and you haven't specified a font mapping, the output won't be a valid PDF/A file. In this case, Helvetica font is used.

  • PDF features not supported in PDF/A documents:

    • All audio and video content, including Flash embedding

    • Transparency (transparent colors render as opaque). Use PDF/A–2B to support transparency.

    • Encryption

  • Reprocessing by utilities isn't supported: Reprocessing PDF/A file using the PDFBookBinder, PDFDocMerger, or PDFSignature (digital signature) utitlities isn't supported. The reprocessed PDF file may lose conformance to the PDF/A standard.

  • Required report configuration properties: The report run-time properties must be set as shown in the following table.

    Property Required Setting

    pdf-version

    Must be lesser than 1.5

    Enable PDF Security

    (pdf-security)

    Must be set to false

    Encryption Level

    (pdf-encryption-level)

    Must be set to 0

    pdf-font-embedding

    Must be set to true

    Formatting properties specific to PDF/A output can be set in the Report Properties dialog. For more information, see PDF/A Output Properties.

Additional Resources

For more information about the PDF/A standard, refer to the Adobe website. Refer also to the iso.org website for articles 'Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1)' and 'Addendum Cor 1:2007'.