Q: How does PDF/A Manager or PDFNet SDK PDF -> PDFA conversion
compares to other PDF/A solutions such as PDFForge PDF Creator?
Here http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator you find the information about
the mentioned open source product PDF Creator. PDFCreator is licensed
under the terms of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.
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A: pdfforge is a fairly different product. It is a simple wrapper
around Ghostscript printer driver. To create a PDF the user needs to
‘print’ a PDF through a source application. The approach is not
suitable for any high-volume or server side use. Because all content
is going through Windows spooler, the resulting file will suffer from
severe information loss (e.g. text loss, rasterized content,
inaccurate color, bloated output, document/logical structure and
accessibility loss etc). The resulting PDF will be also missing
annotations, bookmarks, links, and document metadata.
Given that the design of this software is at odds with the main
objectives of PDF/A and long-term archiving we didn’t bother to run
the app through our compliance verification suite. Please note that
the same limitations are present in any other PDF/A solutions based on
a plain printer driver.
The approach used in ‘pdftron.PDF.PDFACompliance’ of PDFNet as well as
the PDF/A manager is very different. The converter analyses and
processes the original PDF document without going through a printer
driver. The conversion process attempts to preserve as much
information and document structure as possible. For example, all
documents will preserve document metadata, bookmarks, links,
annotations, content tags and other accessibility features, text
search and content extraction capabilities, file size, fonts, ICC
profiles, etc.
PDFNet SDK also includes a universal printer driver so you can convert
from any printable format to PDF (PDF/A), XPS, or SVG. As a starting
point you may want to take a look at Convert sample (http://
www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#Convert). The converter
includes direct support for a number of formats and also supports
direct import from MS Office - resulting in smaller and higher quality
files (with bookmarks, links, metadata, etc).
Finally PDFNet is not using GhostScript and is suitable for commercial
use (it is not GPL) etc.