2016-01-22 13:59 GMT+01:00 Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>:
On 1/22/2016 10:24 AM, Fabrice Popineau wrote:
Hi folks,

There is a recurring problem with PDF files produced by either pdftex or
luatex in France.
Whenever PhD thesis documents are submitted to the French national
archives, they have
to be validated by some automated process which relies on pdftk
(apparently).
And files compiled by pdftex/luatex are rejected.

The problem is described here :
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.text.pdf/ZnobgbiiDZ4

French pdftex/luatex users will have an eternal gratitude to whoever will
make this work :-)

As far as I know luatex (and pdftex) produce valid pdf files. Of course one can add all kind of crap to a pdf file liek invalid objects and so but that is not our responsibility.

Now, to the file:

https://github.com/dbitouze/yathesis/blob/master/doc/latex/yathesis/master-slaves-files-sample/these.pdf?raw=true

Acrobat preflight says that there should be an indirect object in an annotation (normally I'd expect a viewer not to bark on it and acrobat itself handles it ok). Those annotations are probably made by some macro package and one should check that code.

But ... you mention "pdftex or luatex" but this file is not produced by
any of those engines: it's made by xdvipdfmx which is something xetex.

So we're off the hook.


Oh Denis may have been wrong with his own file, but I had this problem and I can guarantee that that was with a file compiled with pdftex.
I had  to use Acrobat to 'fix' the pdf file and make it acceptable for this archive system, which is mandatory for all phd thesis in France.

As this problem surfaced again on the GUTenberg mailing list, I decided to ask.

Here is my attempts width the attached test.tex file :
- without the use of the pdfx package, the validator returns 
  Message : No document catalog dictionary
- with the use of the pdfx package, the validator returns
  Message : Lexical error
  which is annoying and may indicate some kind of error 
  (but is it low level in pdftex or rather in the pdfx package ?)
- after using Acrobat and saving test.pdf as pdf/a-1b, the validator is accepting it.

Fabrice