Thanks to the DT team (or Apple?)... PDF/A issue solved!

Big thanks to the DEVONthink team. With the last version (3.8.1) the problem has been solved, that PDF/A documents in particular contained no or hydroglyphs as text after editing (highlighting, …, or combining).

Great!

BTW: Next step could be to show, if a document is PDF/A (as in Adobe Acrobat, see screenshot)…

Actually version 3.8.1 doesn’t include any PDF/A related changes. Maybe an update of macOS in the meantime?

Ok, then some changes came with the update to macOS 12.2, because before that version all PDF/A files were broken after editing in DT or Preview…

Maybe Apple did fix something in PDFKitt, after all. Of course without mentioning it. The concept of release notes seems to elude them.

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Perhaps the fix wasn’t intentional :see_no_evil:

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Logic suggests that, since the problem was also in Preview, the macOS 12.2 update fixed it, not the DT 13.8.1 update.

I had not noticed this, but the posting here is a good catch.

I agree that showing PDF/A (versus just PDF) in DT would be beneficial. The former is supposedly the preferred standard for archival documents (hence the /A). It helps also to see that PDF/A compliance requires that you include such things as a table of contents in the document, as well as the meta-content for author, title, and so forth. Great stuff to assemble during LaTeX file generation (as a side bar).

Finally, note that various standards exist for /A as shown here PDF/A - Wikipedia

Perhaps DT could have access to show this information and maybe even provide a way to have it used in a search criteria (e.g. type = pdfa-3 versus pdfa-2)


JJW

Is all that really a part of the general PDF/A specification or rather part of the conformity level B? I think, a PDF/A can be perfectly valid even without a TOC and metadata (think a PDF/A invoice, where neither of those are very useful, in my opinion)

Yes, correct. I did follow up reading. PDF/A at various levels only assures future-proofing to access the content. It is not a standard on the content or its organization.


JJW