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Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | edoc Server | Publishing | Dissertation Thesis | Technical requirements to the PDF document

Technical requirements to the PDF document

To ensure the visual reproducibility, user-friendliness and long-term archiving of documents published on the edoc server, PDF files must meet a number of requirements. All requirements can be checked and fixed with Acrobat Adobe Pro. In addition, we recommend to aim for PDF/A compliance. If you have any questions or problems with the implementation of the requirements, please send us an e-mail.

Requirements

For detailed information on checking and implementing, please click on the corresponding link for the requirement. The links lead to the guidelines for creating and editing PDF documents for the edoc-Server (available only in German). Notes on how to meet the requirements when using LaTeX can be found at the bottom of this website.

A1 Title and author are specified in the document properties.
A2 No security settings are active.
A3 All used fonts are embedded in the document.
A4 The document is provided as a single PDF file. The PDF file is named appropriately. The file name should not contain umlauts, spaces or special characters.
Further requirements for dissertations
A5 The page format is DIN A4 or A5.
A6 The language of the document is set in the document properties.
A7 The layout of the text is double-sided printable and the inner margin is at least 25 mm.
A8 Bookmarks, icluding numbering if used, at least reflect the table of content.
A9 The default view upon opening is set to bookmarks, reduced to the first level of the table of contents, and the pages are displayed in window size.
A10 The colour spaces used are specified in the output profile.

Recommendations

D1 Additional labelling is entered as alternative text for figures.
D2 Citations are linked to the bibliography.
D4 Footnotes and endnotes are linked.
D5 Indexes of tables and figures are linked to the respective captions.
D6 Keywords are specified in the document properties
D7 Figures are clearly labelled, e.g. „Abbildung“, „Abb.“, „Figure“ oder „Fig.“.

How to meet the requirements when using LaTeX

Due to the different LaTeX distributions and the large number of packages and options, there is currently no standard solution for creating a fully PDF/A compliant document from LaTeX. It is also not always possible to create a PDF/A compliant file directly from LaTeX.

  • Make sure your LaTeX distribution is up to date.
  • LaTeX embeds all fonts by default. However, this does not apply to fonts used in figures that are embedded as PDF files. If the fonts have not already been embedded there, the fonts used in the figure will also be missing in the overall document.

The following instructions for creating a PDF/A compliant file are taken from the tutorial 'How to create a PDF/A file with LATEX' by Jarmo Niemelä [as of 27/10/2023]. It contains an example and further explanations.


pdfx package

pdfx is a LaTeX package for creating PDF/A compliant documents. Load the package with the following command:

\usepackage[a-2b]{pdfx}

  • You can use the option to specify the PDF/A version (PDF/A-2b in the example). The default value is a-1b.
  • The pdfx package loads hyperref and xcolor, among others, so they need not be called explicitly.
  • The hyperref options can be modified with the \hypersetup command. However, this does not affect the descriptive metadata such as title pdftitle and author names pdfauthor (see metadata with XMP).
  • If the required colour profiles are not already available, they can be installed with the command \usepackage{colorprofiles} before calling the pdfx package. The command can then be removed.
  • pdfx does not currently support the embedding of CMYK colour profiles in PDF/A documents. If you have included images in the CMYK colour space, an additional conversion with Adobe Acrobat Pro is usually required.


Metadata with XMP

The PDF/A standard requires the descriptive metadata of a document, such as the title and authors' names, to be embedded in a specific format. The pdfx package reads this information via a separate text file (so-called XMP file). This file can be created at the beginning of the LaTeX document using the following commands:

\begin{filecontents*}[overwrite]{\jobname.xmpdata}
\Title{ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet}
\Author{Alice Muster}
\Subject{latex document test}
\Keywords{keyword1\sep keyword2\sep keyword3}
\end{filecontents*}


Further notes (when using the hyperref package)

  • The document language (requirement A6) can be specified in the hypersetup options (en = Englisch, de = Deutsch): pdflang={en}
  • Numbered bookmarks (requirement A8) can be created by using the hypersetup option: bookmarksnumbered=true
  • The view when opening ( requirement A9) can be defined with the following hypersetup options: pdfstartview=Fit, pdfpagelayout={SinglePage}, bookmarksopenlevel=0