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. If your file is larger, reduce it before uploading — for PDFs you can try our Compress PDF tool, which accepts files up to 100MB.

Yes — works on any device. The interface is fully responsive and tested on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Touch-friendly upload areas, drag-and-drop support on desktop, and mobile-optimised buttons mean you get the same experience whether you are on a MacBook, an iPad, or an Android phone. No app download is ever required — open your browser and go.

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. Our converter produces PDF/A-2b output — the "basic" conformance level of PDF/A-2, which guarantees visual reproducibility and is accepted by courts, government agencies, national archives and ISO 9001 document control systems. If the body you are filing with specifically requires PDF/A-1b, check before submitting, as some older archival systems mandate that earlier level.

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 PDF/A-1b, the widely accepted level for visual reproducibility, and it opens in any ordinary reader.