I'm a noobie here. Does Prince XML support dynamic creation of PDF's which are PDF/X1-a compliant? Thanks,

Not quite, some manually tweaking is still required, as described in this recent post. We hope to fix at least some of these for the next release of Prince.

any news on this?

We've made big progress on PDF/A, there are still one or two minor details remaining for PDF/X.

hi mike ... any movement on this with Prince 9 release?

We've added PDF IDs, which were a requirement for PDF/X. Checking the preflight panel in Acrobat, it seems that remaining requirements include:

• Adding document creation/modification dates.
• Specifying the TrimBox on every page, even if crop marks are disabled.
• Including an OutputIntent for color spaces; I guess sRGB is a sensible default.
• Explicitly claiming that the document is PDF/X compliant.

However, PDF/X-1 appears to prohibit RGB colors altogether, while PDF/X-3 allows them. This means that Prince may end up generating non-compliant PDF files if the input document contains RGB colors (or images?). Hopefully we can issue an informative warning in this situation.

Hey Mike, any news about PDF/A development?

Prince 9 supports PDF/A-1b, and we are currently testing PDF/A-1a (tagged PDF).

Hi Mike,

Do you need any help with testing de PDF/A-1a? Let me know if we can help you? looking forward to have this in production

Best regards,

Alex

Sure, just email me (mikeday@yeslogic.com) and I will arrange a test build.

The latest Prince alpha now supports PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4, which can be selected using the --pdf-profile option.

Any plans for PDF/A-2? It allows images with transparency, which would be really nice. Or even A3 which allows attachments?

There are so many profiles!

Are there other differences between PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-1? Does PDF/A-2 require tagging, which is still not quite ready yet?

The differences according to the german Wikipedia between PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-1 are:

- based on PDF1.7
- JPEG-2000 compression is allowed
- transparent elements are allowed
- layers are allowed
- OpenType fonts can be embedded
- digital signatures (PDF Advanced Electronic Signatures, ETSI TS 102 778) are allowed
- PDF/A-1 documents can be embedded in PDF/A-2

There are the flavours
- PDF/A-2a, full coverage
- PDF/A-2b, minimum requirements, must guarantee display for longterm archival
- PDF/A-2u, like b but all text has to be Unicode for display and indexing

PDF/3-A additionally allows arbitrary attachments, this is the only difference to PDF/A-2.

I may be wrong but to me it looks like PDF/A-2 allows more things than it demands in terms of new features. I don't know if it must me tagged, but it seems natural that at least PD/A-2a requires it.

Right, I guess supporting PDF/A-2b is the same as PDF/A-1b, we just don't need to complain when we see transparency and similar things.

The latest build of Prince supports the PDF/A-3b profile.

Hi,
Does prince include the "PDF/X-1a:2001" profile?

Thanks,
Michael

Not yet, but we plan to add support for this profile soon once we have CMYK color conversion.

Okay. Thanks. Hope to see it soon.

Hi Mike, this may be a silly question, but which profile is used by default when exporting without the --pdf-profile flag set? I can't seem to find it in the documentation.

No profile-specific metadata is added, so it's just a regular PDF file, from version 1.4 to 1.7 depending on which features have been used.

Hi Mike, Sorry to keep bugging you on this ... but could you tell me how high "PDF/X-1a:2001 profile" is on the Prince roadmap?

Very high! It will be delivered soon, now that we have automatic colorspace conversion to CMYK.

you guys are good!

The latest build now supports the PDF/X-1a profile!

Thank you!

Hi Mike, Thanks for the PDF/X-1a profile support...

Could you clarify expected behaviour?

At Pressbooks we get any old photos uploaded, so users might add RGB, CMYK and god knows what else.

We have a test book with a variety of images with some CMYK & some RGB etc....

If we have the PDF profile setting set to x-1a ... should all those RGB images get converted to CMYK? As far as I can tell (Acrobat Pro>> Preflight check >> Verify PDF/X-1a compliance) ... this isn't happening.

Not sure if we have things configured wrong, or something else. Thoughts?

(NOTE: I'm getting a "bad gateway" error when trying to attach the file -- can I send to you by email?)

Hi Mike! I've been looking at this to see any of the PrinceXML builds support a PDF/A-3 profile.

I see that in a past build there was additional support created for the PDF/A-3b profile, but does that include PDF/A-3 standards plus the PDF/A-3b profile?

jstarks, I'm not sure I understand your question. PDF/A includes several different levels: PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2, PDF/A-3, and those each include "a" (tagged) and "b" (untagged) variants, for six different profiles in total, of which Prince supports PDF/A-1b and PDF/A-3b.

Hugh, it appears that I have misled you and you also need to specify an appropriate CMYK color profile using the --pdf-output-intent option, for example like this:

$ prince --pdf-profile=PDF/X-1a --pdf-output-intent=/path/to/prince/lib/icc/USWebCoatedSWOP.icc ...

(There should be an error message if this is not specified).

Hi,
I cannot create PDFs under prince 13 that are PDF/A-1b compliant. The validation checks fail and complain about missing META information:

"The required XMP property 'xmp:ModifyDate' for the document information entry 'ModDate' is missing."

PDF/A-3b works fine.

I think the problem is a signature added afterwards which makes the file invalid