Scanning to PDF/A on Linux

PDF/A is one of the best formats to archive my documents.

What Linux software would allow me to scan documents to PDF/A ?

A PNG→PDF/A or TIFF→PDF/A tool would be fine too.

Nicolas Raoul

Posted 2010-06-09T09:34:56.657

Reputation: 7 766

OpenOffice seems able to convert office documents to PDF/A, but not really conveninent for images: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/01/generating-pdfa-for-long-term-archiving.html

– Nicolas Raoul – 2010-06-09T09:37:14.797

Answers

If document images (no ocr) is acceptable, then use xsane to scan to postscript files and use ghostscript to concatenate the postscript files. Convert the resulting .ps to PDF/A using ghostscript, using these instructions (mirror).

W_Whalley

Posted 2010-06-09T09:34:56.657

Reputation: 3 212

1Great :-D I will scan to postscript with SANE and then convert to PDF/A using the -dPDFA option of ghostscript. I don't need OCR indeed. – Nicolas Raoul – 2010-06-10T01:45:13.533

The program called 'gscan2pdf' scans directly to pdf, and if your scanner has a document feeder, it will automatically combine the multiple pages into a single pdf file. It can also run ocr software on each page of the scans, and perform alignment/corrections when needed.

In ubuntu, you can find it under 'Applications->Graphics'. If it's not there, then you can install it with 'System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager', with a quick search for 'gscan2pdf'.

unclutter

Posted 2010-06-09T09:34:56.657

Reputation: 1

1I was asking for PDF/A. I already have gscan2pdf, it can't do PDF/A – Nicolas Raoul – 2010-06-10T01:41:50.047

You can use XSane, you select multipage scan and you'll get a option to save to PDF.

Milan Babuškov

Posted 2010-06-09T09:34:56.657

Reputation: 248

1I was asking for PDF/A specifically. XSane does not do PDF/A – Nicolas Raoul – 2013-04-11T09:11:30.470