Ross, it is easy enough to make inclusion of CharSet a runtime option. I'll do it since apparently it will make you happier. However, this will merely revert to the status quo ante which you made your original bug report about, in https://mailman.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-pdftex/2016-June/004087.html. That report is why we made the change to omit CharSet in the first place. As I replied in https://mailman.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-pdftex/2018-June/004251.html that original report appears to be about including the character references for the (deprecated) seac operator. As I also wrote in my reply, although dealing with seac seems moderately doable (but not by me), in the other reported cases the accented characters are completely opaque in the original font. Thus I doubt any solution is easy. (Also, although you say we are smart enough, it seems we aren't, since none of us want to figure out what's actually needed. I know I don't. Sorry.) So, as far as I can see, including the /CharSet will only help in cases where there happen to be no accented or other problematic characters in the document. Otherwise, it seems Adobe's preflight will still fail (according to your original report). I suppose it is worth doing for those cases, but it is no panacea. It is not clear to me whether the option should default to omitting CharSet or including the likely-incorrect CharSet. What do you advise? I gather the PDF/A-1 standard is not available online. -k