openjournals
PDF/A documents
Hi JOSS! I think this issue belongs here (rather than in the review repo). Please let me know if I'm mistaken.
It was my intention today to upload a recent JOSS publication of mine to the NSF PAR so I could include it in an annual report.
I ran into issues converting the JOSS-produced PDF to the PDF/A format. I have not yet solved these issues but have made progress and list it below. Perhaps some of you have recommendations.
My failing attempts to convert my PDF made me think that a more sustainable solution would be for JOSS to produce PDF/A compatible (or at least convertible) PDFs.
What I tried to do Use Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert the JOSS-produced PDF to PDF/A.
What Adobe said was wrong with the PDF The accessibility tools (in Adobe) indicated that the following issues existed:
- No language is set for the document
- No alternate text exists for the following images: a) the JOSS logo b) the bullet points to the left of review, repository, and archive c) the little icons that mean "link" to the right of review repository and archive.
Outcome I was able to fix all these things manually, but still my PDF didn't want to save as PDF/A. Acrobat Pro stated that a warning existed but didn't say what it was.
Thanks for flagging this @kbarnhart. I've little/no experience of PDF/A but from a quick search it looks like we might be able to produce these using pdftex (which we currently use with Pandoc):
- https://support.stmdocs.in/wiki/?title=Generating_PDF/A_compliant_PDFs_from_pdftex
- https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/pdfx
Honestly, we're a little stretched thin right now on JOSS so I doubt I'm going to get to this in the near term but I'm happy to keep this in the backlog of features we'd like to support in the long run.
Also, I'll be moving this to the https://github.com/openjournals/whedon repo imminently as this is the logical home for this I think.
Thanks @arfon! I think its totally fine for this to be relatively low priority. As best as I can tell, this is a relatively new NSF requirement.
In case others have this issue, I did find a solution. While I never was able to convert using Adobe, using the docpub website converter I was able to convert to a document that NSF accepted.