Concatenating PDFA documents using iTextSharp into valid PDFA document

Question

I'm trying to concatenate several PDFA documents into one file using iTextSharp 5.1.3 using the following code:

    Try
        Dim f As Integer = 0
        Dim outFile As String = destinationFile
        Dim document As iTextSharp.text.Document = Nothing
        Dim writer As PdfSmartCopy = Nothing
        While f < sourceFiles.Length
            ' Create a reader for a certain document
            Dim reader As New PdfReader(sourceFiles(f))

            ' Retrieve the total number of pages
            Dim n As Integer = reader.NumberOfPages
            If f = 0 Then
                document = New iTextSharp.text.Document(reader.GetPageSizeWithRotation(1))
                writer = New PdfSmartCopy(document, New FileStream(outFile, FileMode.Create))
                document.Open()
            End If

            Dim page As PdfImportedPage
            Dim i As Integer = 0
            While i < n
                i += 1
                page = writer.GetImportedPage(reader, i)
                writer.AddPage(page)
            End While
            Dim form As PRAcroForm = reader.AcroForm
            If form IsNot Nothing Then
                writer.CopyAcroForm(reader)
            End If
            f += 1
        End While
        document.Close()
    Catch generatedExceptionName As Exception
    End Try

If I open any of the input files in Acrobat Reader X I get a message saying that they are indeed PDFA, but not if I open the output file that the code above creates. So it would seem that my newly created concatenated PDF document doesn't conform to PDFA.

I've tried setting the writer.PDFXConformance property to PdfWriter.PDFA1A but that doesn't help.

Does anyone know if it is possible to achieve what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

When using PDFXConformance you also need to call CreateXmpMetadata on the writer object. I usually do that right before closing the document, I'm not 100% certain it needs to go there but that's where everyone else puts it.

End While
writer.CreateXmpMetadata()
document.Close()

Then when you instantiate your writer set the conformance property just as you were:

writer = New PdfSmartCopy(document, New FileStream(outFile, FileMode.Create))
writer.PDFXConformance = PdfWriter.PDFA1A