Introduction

PDF/A documents have been around since 2005. PDF/A is designed for the long-term preservation and archiving of electronic documents. D365FO supports the creation of PDF outputs from SSRS reports, but PDF/A is not supported. Fortunately, Docentric AX fills this gap by allowing you to generate PDF/A documents directly from D365FO.

In this article I will first cover some basics about PDF/A standard. Then I will show you how to set up Docentric AX Print destinations to create PDF/A documents.

If you would rather watch a video than read the article, please check the video below.

PDF/A Standard Versions and Conformance Levels

You can refer to Wikipedia to read about PDF/A. This chapter summarizes the essential information from there.

The ISO 19005 standard contains specifications for the file format of electronic documents for long-term archiving, abbreviated as PDF/A. Several PDF/A versions have emerged over time:

• PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1) was published in 2005 and is based on PDF 1.4
• PDF/A-2 (ISO 19005-2) was published in 2011 and is based on PDF 1.7
• PDF/A-3 (ISO 19005-3) was published in 2012 and is still based on PDF 1.7
• PDF/A-4 (ISO 19005-4) was published in 2020 and is based on PDF 2.0

An important prerequisite for this reproducibility is the requirement that PDF/A documents are 100 percent self-contained, meaning that all the information required to display the document is contained in the file, for example, Text, raster images, vector graphics, fonts and color information - to name just some of them. The only external links allowed in PDF/A documents are hypertext links to external documents.

Generating a PDF/A report in D365FO

Standard D365FO doesn’t have OOTB support for generating PDF/A documents. Docentric AX Full Edition is filling this gap by giving you several options for generating and storing PDF/A documents from reports in D365FO.

If your business requires PDF/A compliant documents then Docentric AX, starting from version 3.4.6, supports the following:

• PDF/A standard versions PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3.
• PDF/A conformance levels a, b and u.
• Specifically:
  • PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-1b,
  • PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u,
  • PDF/A-3a, PDF/A-3b, PDF/A-3u.
• The use of custom fonts.

Setting up Docentric AX for PDF/A support

With the Full Edition of Docentric AX you can create PDF/A output from reports based on SSRS designs or Docentric templates.

The screenshot below shows a list of template options for the PurchPurchaseOrder report. The selection with the yellow highlight uses standard SSRS design to generate the PDF/A format. Others use Docentric templates.

All Docentric AX Print destinations are supported: Print archive, Screen, Printer, File, Email, under the condition that the selected output format is PDF. If the output format is not PDF, then PDF/A settings are ignored.

Specifics of the Printer print destination

At first glance you may ask what the Printer print destination has to do with PDF/A documents? They are printed on paper, and the source document will look the same whether it be printed in PDF or PDF/A format, won’t it? If you are printing on the physical printer, then you are absolutely right. If you select one of the PDF/A formats and print to physical printer, the PDF/A settings are ignored.

However, Docentric Printer print destination has also the option Print as PDF. This allows you to send generated PDF via Document Routing Agent (DRA) configured to run as a service (on some network computer) to the local network and save it there. In this scenario, you can set PDF/A on the Print destination – Docentric form and the generated report will use this format.

PDF/A settings are available under the Options > More:
 

For example, if you need the PDF/A-2u conformance level, you select it from the drop-down list. This standard includes features to improve digital accessibility, supports JPEG 2000 image compression, transparency effects and layers, OpenType fonts, just to name a few. It also requires that all text in the document has a Unicode mapping. It provides for digital signatures in accordance with the PDF Advanced Electronic Signatures (PAdES) standard.

Printing PDF/A documents

After you have made the settings in the Print destination settings – Docentric form as described above, you can print the report as usual. If Docentric recognizes that you have selected one of the PDF/A output formats, it will create the report in that format and send it to the selected print destination.

In my scenario, I printed a sales order invoice report from the invoice journal to the File print destination. When I opened the file in Acrobat Reader, a message appeared at the top of the screen stating that the file claims to be PDF/A compliant.

Validation of PDF/A files

There are several online sources where you can validate PDF/A files, to make sure they are compatible with the PDF/A standard. I used PDF Forge to test compatibility of PDF/A versions, supported in Docentric AX which I printed in earlier steps.

The following screenshots show the validations of the same Sales invoice printed using each of the PDF/A conformance levels supported by Docentric AX.

See also

We have many additional videos on our YouTube Channel if you would like to see more videos on how to use Docentric AX.