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Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

The forms extensions in PDF are a problem in FOSS software. I'm wondering if this tool does, or can export the downloaded (edited) PDF as PDF/A-2 (or PDF/A-3) conforming? Because a problem is having PDFs you've filled out that aren't archival documents; and further to that a nice option would be support for embedded digital signatures.

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Thanks for the ideas! The downloaded PDFs are not in a PDF/A format. I understand the need for a feature like this - I have used some government services that only allow submitted PDFs in archivable format. The commercial PDF->PDF/A libraries I came across are pretty pricey. Do you know of any open source alternatives?

I don't. If they don't exist or aren't really good (fast, well documented, good APIs, bindings available for various languages) then I think that's something that needs to be pitched to hand waive. Maybe the Free Software Foundation has ideas, or the Document Foundation, and then also various governments.

That so many governments use, and insist their citizens use PDFs, it's really not OK for us to have to depend on proprietary closed source software. I have zero problem with making a profit on great tools and infrastructure and services, but the foundation needs to be owned by the public.

PDFBox from Apache has this: https://pdfbox.apache.org/1.8/cookbook/pdfacreation.html

https://github.com/veraPDF/ has some tools

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