Hi Karl,

On Jun 11, 2016, at 8:57 AM, Karl Berry <karl@freefriends.org> wrote:

Hi Ross - I don't have the DavidCLM-Medium font, and had never heard of
the culmus package; I see now it is a pretty big effort on sf.

At any rate, I (or Thanh or whomever) need an example demonstrating the
failure that can be run.  Maybe you can make a self-contained set of
files (the font(s) in needed formats, the tex source, etc.)?

Or: it doesn't matter if there is a workaround for it, as long as it
shows the failure.  So if you have an example that uses fonts already in
TL, so much the better.

Certainly. 
The   texlive-de.tex   documentation uses a font that is affected this way.

Attached is a cut-down example source,    test-berafont.tex
with PDFs:   test-berafont-pdftex.pdf    — PDF/A using  pdfTeX
and              test-berafont-gs.pdf     — plain PDF using dvips+GS 

You can see the difference in the attached PDFs:

SCI:TL-DE16 ross$ grep -a CharSet test-berafont-gs.pdf
/CharSet(/A/E/L/T/V/X/a/aacute/acute/e/g/i/l/n/o/one/r/s/six/t/two/u/v/z/zero)/FontFile3 12 0 R>>
SCI:TL-DE16 ross$ mv test-berafont.pdf test-berafont-pdftex.pdf
SCI:TL-DE16 ross$ grep -a CharSet test-berafont-pdftex.pdf
/CharSet (/A/E/L/T/V/X/aacute/e/g/i/l/n/o/one/r/s/six/t/two/u/v/z/zero)
  
where pdfTeX just puts  /aacute   GS includes  /a/aacute/acute .

To get a valid PDF/A directly using  dvips+GS  requires stuff you don’t yet have,
and I’m in discussions with a GS developer to perfect.
It should certainly be ready for release later this year.