PDF/A-1A Compliance

[ethanmdavidson]

Hi, we are using the merge task to combine several PDFs into one file, and sending that file to a professional printing company who prints it and mails it out. The merged file is very large, usually around 15,000 pages, usually around 800MB in size.

The printing company reached out to us the other day saying that they were having trouble printing it because when they send the pdf file to the printer, the printer is expanding it to ~16GB (not sure what they mean by this, I'm guessing the printer is converting the file to postscript). They weren't able to explain the problem very well, but they said it was happening because "the file does not have the font embedded on every page", and that it would be better if we could save the file as "PDFA-1a 2005 compliant file". I assume they are referring to the PDF/A specification.

I don't know much about PDF, but it was my understanding that the fonts were defined once at the beginning of the file and then simply referenced throughout the rest of the file. Can you shed any light on this? Is sejda capable of embedding fonts or creating a PDFA-1A compliant file?