PDFTron PDF/A Converter and flattening embedded PDF files

Q: Regarding the embedded .pdfs: is it allowed to embed pdf/a .pdfs
within final pdf/a documents? Or is it possible to 'flatten' a pdf
document with embedded other .pdfs before converting the whole
document to pdf/a?

Basically the fact that our pdf 1.4 source files may have other .pdf
1.4 documents embedded is a unchangable constraint and we do have to
create pdf/a documents in the end.. So basically I am looking for a
way to accomplish that. Is that somehow possible?
------
A: Unfortunately PDF/A standard does not support file attachments or
embedded files.

However, you could use PDFNet SDK to read PDF (and other) attachments
prior to PDF/A conversion (using pdftron.PDF.PDFAComplanice) and merge
them with the parent file (I guess, you are referring to this process
as 'flattening').

For more information on how to extract file attachments from PDF, you
may want to search PDFNet KB (http://groups.google.ca/group/pdfnet-
sdk) for keywords such as "File attachment" etc.

To merge PDF pages with an existing PDF file you may want to take a
look at the last code example in PDFPage sample project (http://
www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#PDFPage).