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Known Participant
May 4, 2021
Question

Cannot save as PDF/A after sanitizing document

  • May 4, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 1554 views

Whenever I sanitize a document and attempt to save it as a PDF/A, I get an error stating that I cannot do so

 

Is this normal? Is there a workaround?

Thank you

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1 reply

Legend
May 4, 2021

Does the message give any more details? If not, try using Preflight to save as PDF/A instead, which should give more messages.

Known Participant
May 4, 2021

OK so here is the error message:

 

 

Then I went into Preflight and clicked Analyze and Fix then tried saving as a PDF/A again and got the same error -- this is what Preflight window showed:

 

 

Legend
May 4, 2021

Thank you, very interesting. And completely logical, if susprising.

 

PDF/A documents must have document metadata filled in properly. For example, a document title.

Sanitizing removes this. So it can no longer be saved as PDF/A, and Acrobat has no way to guess what the proper metadata is.

 

I suggest you either click the option to be selective, when you sanitize, and don't touch the document metadata; or add some after sanitizing with File > Properties.