Validate PDF/A
Find out why an archive submission was rejected.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDF here
or choose it from your files
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Before you start
- The report is plain text — attach it when you ask the sender for a corrected file.
- Fixing it here? Convert a PDF to PDF/A converts the file and lists anything it still can't fix.
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
Add your file
Add the PDF that has to be PDF/A — a court filing, a records submission, anything an archive will keep.
Set it up the way you want
There is nothing to set. The declaration, the color profile, the fonts and the forbidden features are all read from the file.
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 — color 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.