PDF/A (ISO 19005, Archival)

PDF/A (ISO 19005) is the PDF profile for long-term storage. Its rules come down to a single requirement: the file must open and look the same decades later, without internet and without external resources. That is why fonts have to be inside the document, colour is described through an output profile, and scripts, forms, encryption, external links and multimedia are forbidden.

Such a profile is required where a document lives long and does not belong to one person: state and municipal archives, libraries and repositories, legal materials, regulatory submissions. A map of a territory on a specific date is a typical archival document: what matters is that many years later it can be opened in the same form.

The export works like this: the map is rendered into PDF by the QGIS print layout, after which PDF/A-2b markers are added to the file — XMP metadata stating the conformance level, a description of the sRGB output profile, no scripts and no encryption. Level "b" is responsible for visual reproducibility: the document is guaranteed to display identically, but it is not tagged for reading by screen readers. The final conformance is worth confirming with a validator — that is a one-minute job with the free veraPDF.