PDF/A vs PDF: which one should you archive?
If a court, a records office or a compliance auditor has asked for PDF/A, they are asking for a guarantee: that the document will render identically decades from now, on software nobody has written yet. Ordinary PDF makes no such promise.
Drag and drop here, or choose from your device.
Up to 50 MB per file. Files are processed in your browser.
Full options and FAQs on the PDF Metadata Editor page.
What PDF/A restricts
- Fonts must be embedded. A plain PDF can reference a font installed on your machine; if that font disappears, the layout shifts.
- No external dependencies — no linked content, no audio or video, no JavaScript.
- No encryption. An archived document must be openable without a key that will inevitably be lost.
- Colour must be defined unambiguously, with an embedded colour profile rather than a device-dependent guess.
- Metadata must be present and machine-readable, so the file can be catalogued without opening it.
When you actually need it
Court filings, statutory records, regulated financial and clinical documentation, national archive deposits and many public-sector tenders specify PDF/A explicitly. If a specification names it, treat it as mandatory rather than advisory.
For everything else — invoices you keep for seven years, project documentation, personal records — ordinary PDF with embedded fonts is entirely adequate. The formats that genuinely die are proprietary ones, not PDF.
The part you can control today
Whether or not you convert to PDF/A, metadata is what makes an archive usable. A folder of files called scan_0041.pdf is an archive in name only; the same files with a real title, author and subject can be searched and sorted years later.
Set the metadata when you file the document, not when you eventually need it. The tool below writes title, author, subject and keywords directly into the file, on your own device.
Step by step
- 1Check whether the receiving body's specification names PDF/A — if it does, use a PDF/A export from the source application.
- 2For ordinary long-term storage, keep plain PDF but make sure fonts were embedded at export time.
- 3Remove any password protection before archiving, and record access rules separately.
- 4Use the tool below to set a meaningful title, author and subject on every archived file.
- 5Store a checksum alongside the archive so you can prove the file has not changed.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I convert an existing PDF to PDF/A?
- Yes, with software that can embed the missing fonts and colour profiles — typically Acrobat or a dedicated archiving tool. It is a conversion, not a metadata change.
- Is PDF/A bigger than normal PDF?
- Usually somewhat, because fonts and colour profiles are embedded rather than referenced. That extra data is precisely what makes it durable.
- Will a PDF/A file open in a normal reader?
- Yes. It is a constrained subset of PDF, so any reader opens it exactly like any other document.