Convert PDF to PDF/A for Archiving

Yes, completely free. Our PDF to PDF/A tool has no hidden costs, no watermarks, and no registration requirement. You can process as many files as you need, each up to 100MB, at no charge. We believe professional PDF tools should be accessible to everyone — students, freelancers, and businesses alike.

Your files are fully protected. All uploads and downloads use 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption during transfer. Processing happens on our isolated Hetzner server infrastructure in Germany — your file is never shared, analysed for commercial purposes, or stored longer than necessary. Every uploaded and processed file is automatically and permanently deleted within 24 hours of processing.

Supported file types: This tool accepts PDF files up to 100MB each. One PDF at a time, and it must not be encrypted: the archival standard forbids password protection, so unlock a protected file before converting it.

Yes, and nothing on this page behaves differently on a phone. Upload, pick a conformance level, download. The one thing to check on any device is that the file is not password protected, because the archival standard forbids encryption and the conversion will refuse to run.

PDF/A is an ISO-standardised subset of PDF designed for long-term archiving. It requires all fonts to be embedded, disallows encrypted content, and bans external dependencies like linked content or JavaScript. You choose the level from the PDF/A Version menu. PDF/A-2b is selected by default — the "basic" conformance level of PDF/A-2, which guarantees visual reproducibility and is what most courts, government agencies and national archives ask for today. Pick PDF/A-1b if the body you are filing with mandates the older level, as some long-established archival systems do, and PDF/A-3b only when you need to carry attached files inside the document. If you are unsure, check the receiving system’s requirements before converting rather than after.

Anyone filing into a system that has to still open the document long after the software used to make it has gone. Courts, land registries, national archives, medical records teams and ISO-audited document control all specify it, and a submission in ordinary PDF is often rejected outright. The reasoning is straightforward: an ordinary PDF may depend on a font or a colour profile that happens to be on the machine displaying it, and a file that renders differently in twenty years is no use as a record.

The usual cause is encryption. The archival standard forbids it — a file nobody can open in fifty years defeats the purpose — so a password-protected document has to be decrypted first with Unlock PDF and then converted. The other common blocker is a font that cannot be embedded because its licence does not permit it; the fix there is upstream, by re-exporting the source document with a substitutable typeface before it ever becomes a PDF.

No — it is a records format, not a better PDF. Embedding every font and colour profile makes the file bigger, sometimes considerably, and none of that helps a document being emailed today and forgotten next week. Convert when a retention policy or a filing requirement calls for it. Convert last, too: do any merging, page removal or compression beforehand, because compressing an archival file afterwards throws away the fidelity you converted to obtain.

It is made self-contained. Every font in use is embedded rather than referenced, colour is described against a profile carried in the document instead of assumed, and anything that reaches outside the file is stripped — encryption, embedded scripts, links to external content and unembedded media. The visible page is unchanged, which is the whole point; you should not be able to tell the two apart on screen. The output is whichever level you picked — PDF/A-2b unless you changed it, the widely accepted level for visual reproducibility — and it opens in any ordinary reader.