Validate PDF/A
Find out why an archive submission was rejected.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDFs here
or pick them from your device
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run this tool and the next one back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
- 1
Add your file
Add the PDF that has to be PDF/A — a court filing, a records submission, anything an archive will keep.
- 2
Set it up the way you want
There is nothing to set. The declaration, the colour profile, the fonts and the forbidden features are all read from the file.
- 3
Download the result
Download the report. It lists what passed, what failed, and what this tool could not check.
Questions about Validate PDF/A
- Does passing mean my file is valid PDF/A?
- No, and the report says so in the same words. The reference validator is veraPDF and the specification runs to hundreds of clauses — colour spaces inside page content, profile validity, structure tags. A pass here means nothing was found among the items listed, which is useful but is not a certificate.
- It says there is no declaration. Is the file broken?
- No, it just is not PDF/A. The declaration is a piece of metadata saying "this is PDF/A-2b"; without it, validators reject the file without even looking at the rest. If you need PDF/A, run Convert to PDF/A, which writes that declaration along with everything it requires.
- Fonts are the failure. Why does that matter so much?
- Because an archive format exists to make a document look the same in twenty years. A font that is referenced but not embedded gets substituted on any machine that lacks it — line breaks move, tables shift, and a signed document no longer matches what was signed.