I won't have a chance to try and duplicate the problem until later today (CET) but here is the customer's email: I have been testing pdf->pdf/a conversion using GS 8.71. I have installed GS 9.01 The attached source file converts to pdf/a with 8.71 but gets distiller error with gs 9.01. Attached is a zip with - embeddedJpgNormal.pdf : the source file - out.pdf : the output file which does not verify in adobe preflight 10 - commandlineused.txt : command line I used and description of issue - AdobePreflightVerificationFailReport.pdf : failure report from adobe preflight generated when trying to verify pdfa
The problem is that the original PDF file contains an embedded subset TrueType font. PDF/A requires that fonts be embedded and *not* subset. Since we don't have the original font, we cannot embed the entire font and must embed the subset. This leads to the PDF/A non-conformance error. In fact there are no glyphs used which are not in the font, but the Acrobat pre-flight doesn't detect that, it simply notices that the font is marked as a subset and flags the error. Removing the 'XXXXXX+' prefix from the font clears the error :-) So why did the 8.71 output not get an error ? That is due to a limitation of the pre-flight checker. The current code embeds the font as a TrueType, just like the original file, the 8.71 code embeds it as a CIDFont with TrueType outlines. It seems the pre-flight doesn't check CIDFonts. So the file has the same problems it always has had, its simply that recent changes have exposed the problem to the pre-flight tool. At some point I will rewrite the TrueType embedding so that we get rid of the CMAP error, but there's no getting away from the fact that if you start from a subset font, the result is always going to be a subset font, and unacceptable in a PDF/A file.