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Instructions for creating PDF/A-compliant files for online publishing at the TU Berlin / University Library of TU Berlin,
Dept. University press / Theses
(August 20
th
, 2015)
Instructions for creating PDF/A-compliant files for online publishing
at the TU Berlin.
We only accept PDF documents meeting the criteria for one of following archiving formats:
• PDF/A-1b:2005(RGB) (PDF optimized for online publishing)
• PDF/X-3:2002 (PDF optimized for print production)
Since 2005, PDF/A is a stable, internationally accepted ISO standard for long-term archiving. A PDF/A
or PDF/X-compliant document may reproduce its visually identically content on different computers
with different operating systems and under different printing environments. For example, all fonts
and color information used will be embedded in the file.
Free as well as proprietary tools for production, processing and validation of PDF/A- and PDF/X-
compliant files are available. Examples are Adobe Acrobat Professional (not to be confused with
Adobe Reader), PDF-T-Maker/Ghostscript and PDF-24. Many text processing and layout software
suites already provide direct exporting these formats, such as Open Office, Adobe InDesign or MS
Office 2010 and newer.
Here are some short instructions for the creation of PDF files using a few selected tools:
» MS Word 2010 and newer
» MS Word 2007
» Adobe Acrobat Distiller
» Open Office/Libre Office
» LaTeX
» Software-independent PDF/A creation
» Validating the PDF/A compliance
» Converting a file to PDF/A subsequently
Please note that any conversion can cause errors. We therefore kindly ask you to carefully check your
converted PDF/A file, in particular figures, formulas and fonts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.