A contract, invoice or record that has to stay readable in ten or twenty years, in whatever PDF viewer exists then — not just the one you have today. PDF/A locks in fonts and colour handling so the file does not depend on anything outside itself. Nothing is re-compressed beyond what the archival format requires.
Your file is gone the moment the conversion is done. The PDF/A converter needs a real file to work with, so your PDF touches disk for the few seconds the conversion takes — there is no 45-minute copy sitting around afterwards like the other PDF tools on this site.
By ShinobiTools Team · Last updated: August 2026
A regular PDF is allowed to reference things outside the file — a font installed on the system that made it, for instance. That works fine today and can quietly break in a viewer years from now. PDF/A closes those gaps: fonts are embedded, colour spaces are device-independent, and the file carries its own identifier so archival software can confirm it qualifies.
PDF/A is the ISO 19005 standard this page converts to; PDFA, written without the slash, is the same thing, and the result is always PDF/A-2b.
Government record-keeping systems, legal e-filing portals and many corporate document-retention policies specifically ask for PDF/A rather than plain PDF, precisely because of that long-term guarantee.
Your PDF is converted on our own machine and the original is deleted the moment it is done.
Drop a PDF in and you get PDF/A-2b back, with nothing to configure and nothing to install: the conversion runs on our server. It embeds every font and fixes colour spaces to the self-contained rules the ISO standard requires, the two things archival software checks for. If you're wondering how to create a PDF A file, that is all it takes; you don't need to create a PDF from scratch, and to convert to PDF/A you only upload the file you have.
Looking to pull the text back out as an editable document rather than lock it down for archiving? That's the opposite job — PDF to Word converts to editable text; this page converts to the fixed, self-contained PDF/A format instead.
Converting a file that first needs fixing? Repair PDF rebuilds a damaged one before you archive it. Need to strip identifying details before it goes into a public archive? Remove PDF Metadata handles that. Don't have that invoice as a PDF yet? Invoice Generator builds one from scratch, ready to convert here.
Drop the file in. It is converted automatically to PDF/A-2b — there is nothing to configure.
PDF/A is the ISO-standardised version of PDF built for long-term archiving. It requires fonts to be embedded and colour to be handled in a self-contained way, so the file renders the same in a viewer decades from now as it does today — a regular PDF can rely on external fonts or settings a future viewer might not have.
PDF/A-2b, the level most archive systems and government submission portals ask for. It carries a PDF/A identifier embedded in the file's metadata that archival software checks for.
The page content itself is preserved. Some non-archival features — certain transparency effects or non-embedded fonts — get converted into an archive-safe equivalent, which is the whole point of the format.
Yes, a scanned PDF converts the same way as any other — the image content is preserved.
25 pages per file. There is no account, no watermark and no daily cap.
Yes — drop the file in your browser and the converted file downloads automatically. No account, no watermark, no daily cap, up to 25 pages per file.
This tool converts PDF to PDF/A for archiving, not the other way around. To open a PDF/A as a plain PDF, open it in any PDF editor — the difference is mainly in metadata and font embedding, so most editors handle it without any conversion step.
Yes. Government e-filing portals and legal record-keeping systems specifically require PDF/A because it guarantees the file will render correctly years from now, independent of fonts or viewer settings.
Most files convert in a few seconds. Larger files with many images take a little longer, but the download starts as soon as it is done.
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