PDF/A compliant thesis

Producing pdf/a compliant documents directly from LaTeX is not straight forward.

For this to work, also all input files need to be pdf/a compliant.

This basically means:

• They must contain correct color profiles
• Fonts must be embedded
• Metadata must be set for the main document

A lot of help comes from the documentation of the pdfx LaTeX package, which also covers PDF/A standards.

Most importantly, the resulting PDF file is checked for compliance using verapdf, download here https://verapdf.org/software/.

Make sure this in your $PATH, e.g. by unpacking into $HOME/.local/verapdf and doing ln -s $HOME/.local/verapdf/verapdf $HOME/.local/bin.

If the pdf is not compliant, make will fail. The report with the found issues is in build/pdfa_compliance.xml.

This repo also contains the necessary settings to produce PDF/A compliant matplotlib plots using the pgf backend.

Important resources:

• pdfx documentation: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/pdfx/pdfx.pdf
• Important option for lualatex: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/474197/pdfx-incomplete-cidset-in-some-fonts/474336#474336