Show HN: Fynepdf-pdfa – PDF/A conversion without Ghostscript (MIT)

Turn PDFs into valid PDF/A by fixing them in place, not rebuilding them. A C++17 library and command line on qpdf, MIT licensed, with no Ghostscript. Made by FynePDF for its web and desktop apps. Valid: 99.3% of 2,053 test files come out valid PDF/A-2b, checked by veraPDF (Ghostscript: 93.5%, LibreOffice: 96.0%). Honest: a file it can't make PDF/A is never labelled PDF/A, and you're told why. The other tools mislabel 62 to 192 of the same files. Keeps the document: text, bookmarks, links, form fields, tags and layers stay as they were. Only what PDF/A forbids changes. Missing fonts handled: a font the PDF names without embedding gets a free stand-in with the same widths (Arial → Arimo, Times → Tinos, Calibri → Carlito, Cambria → Caladea, Chinese, Japanese and Korean too), so no line moves. Light: a typical file takes 0.01 s and 11 MB; the heaviest of 2,053 took 4.5 s and 215 MB. PDF/A-1b, 2b and 3b. PDF/A-1b pages that use transparency are drawn with PDFium when it's there, their text kept searchable. PDF/A-2b on the same 2,053 files (the veraPDF corpus, 1,000 PDFs from the web, and files made to test every PDF/A rule), each result checked by veraPDF 1.31: "Lost" means bookmarks, links, form fields, tags, comments, attachments or signatures the input had and the result doesn't. fynepdf-pdfa's 22 are comments and attachments PDF/A itself forbids; it lost no bookmark, link, field or tag. Every tool, level and set, real files and how to run it yourself: docs/benchmarks.md. From the command line npx fynepdf-pdfa input.pdf output.pdf # PDF/A-2b npx fynepdf-pdfa input.pdf output.pdf --part 1 # PDF/A-1b (or --part 3) Through npm it runs on Linux (x64, arm64), Windows (x64) and macOS (Apple silicon, Intel), with nothing to build. Or download your platform's archive from Releases: the program, its fonts and PDFium, ready to run as ./fynepdf-pdfa input.pdf output.pdf. It prints what happened as one line of JSON and writes output.pdf: {"ok":true,"conforms":true,"pages":12,"signatures":0,"problems":[],"changes":{"cmyk-colours":31,"font-widths-written":2,"javascript":1}} conforms is false when the file couldn't be made PDF/A. It is then written without the PDF/A label, and problems say why (for example font-not-embedded: KozMinPr6N-Regular). Exit codes: 0 done, 2 needs a password, 3 can't be read, 5 can't be written. The fonts are found beside the program or in the install; --fonts points elsewhere. From Node const { toPdfa } = require("fynepdf-pdfa"); // npm install fynepdf-pdfa const result = await toPdfa("in.pdf", "out.pdf", { part: 2 }); // result.conforms, result.problems, result.changes: the JSON above It rejects when the file can't be read, needs a password or can't be written (error.code). Types included; more in npm/fynepdf-pdfa. From C++ #include fynepdf::pdfa::PdfaOptions options; options.part = 2; // PDF/A-1b, 2b or 3b options.fonts = "path/to/fonts"; // this repository's fonts/ (installed: FYNEPDF_PDFA_FONTS_DIR) fynepdf::pdfa::PdfaResult result = fynepdf::pdfa::ConvertToPdfa("in.pdf", "out.pdf", options); if (result.ok && result.conforms) { // out.pdf is PDF/A-2b } else { // result.error: "password", "unreadable", ...; result.problems: why it isn't PDF/A } examples/convert.cpp is a complete program. In your CMake project include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare(fynepdf_pdfa GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/fynepdf/fynepdf-pdfa.git GIT_TAG v0.1.2) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(fynepdf_pdfa) target_link_libraries(your_app PRIVATE fynepdf::pdfa) Or install it (cmake --install build) and use find_package(fynepdf_pdfa CONFIG REQUIRED), which also sets FYNEPDF_PDFA_FONTS_DIR to the installed fonts. It needs qpdf and a libjpeg from your system or vcpkg (the repository has a vcpkg.json). Build it You need CMake 3.16+, a C++17 compiler, qpdf 11 or newer and libjpeg-turbo. OpenJPEG (JPEG 2000 pictures), Little CMS (ICC profiles) and PDFium (PDF/A-1b transparency) are optional. # Debian or Ubuntu sudo apt install cmake ninja-build g++ pkg-config libqpdf-dev libjpeg-dev libopenjp2-7-dev liblcms2-dev # macOS brew install cmake ninja qpdf jpeg-turbo openjpeg little-cms2 cmake --preset default # Release build with tests, into build/default cmake --build --preset default ctest --preset default # converts the 64 test files at 1b, 2b and 3b On Windows (or anywhere) with vcpkg: set VCPKG_ROOT and use --preset vcpkg instead. For PDF/A-1b pages that use transparency, add -DFYNEPDF_PDFA_PDFIUM_DIR= with a pdfium-binaries release unpacked in it (PDFium is loaded only when a page needs it). Add -DFYNEPDF_PDFA_VERAPDF=docker to check every test result with veraPDF too. The self-contained program the releases ship (its libraries linked in from vcpkg, PDFium and the fonts beside it) comes from node scripts/release-build.mjs , for linux-x64, linux-arm64, win32-x64, darwin-arm64 or darwin-x64; Linux targets build in Docker from any machine. RELEASING.md has the rest. Built and tested on Linux (Debian 12, GCC 12) and Windows (LLVM-MinGW, Clang 22). macOS and Visual Studio builds are set up and covered by CI from the first release. How it works It opens the PDF with qpdf and goes through it pass by pass: repair, catalog, colours, forms, pages, layers, attachments, every object, content streams, fonts, text, transparency (PDF/A-1), then the output intent and metadata. Each pass changes only what PDF/A forbids; the PDF/A label goes on last, only if nothing is left. The fonts are most of the work: every font is read, checked against the codes the pages show, fixed in place or replaced by a free font with the same widths. The full story, and what it doesn't do (the "a" and "u" levels, OCR, PDF/A-4): docs/how-it-works.md. Why FynePDF built it FynePDF used Ghostscript for PDF/A, like most tools do. It labelled files PDF/A that weren't, lost bookmarks and text along the way, used a lot of the server, and its AGPL licence ruled it out of our desktop app. We wanted PDF/A we could ship everywhere and trust, so we wrote our own and measured it against everything else on the same files. This is it. Sister project: fynepdf-grayscale, which makes PDFs gray the same way, in place. MIT, © 2026 FynePDF. The fonts in fonts/ keep their own licences (SIL OFL 1.1, Apache-2.0, Bitstream Vera, BSD-3-Clause for Adobe's CMaps); see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.