PDFTK can't combine PDF/X-3?

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oscillator

After combining several PDF/X-3 documents (version verified using Adobe Acrobat X) using pdftk, they are no longer X-3 but 1.4. pdftk seems to lose this information. Or am I missing something?

Nermander

I think that is something you should ask the pdftk developers and not the Scribus developers.

oscillator

Well, maybe not the developers, but maybe one of the users? I just thought that this would be a common problem for Scribus users because of the "page limit"... Anyway, I've sent an email to the pdftk developer, I'll post any reply here.

Meanwhile, I solved the problem using ghostscript:

gs -dPDFX -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dUseCIEColor -dNOOUTERSAVE -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=outputfile.pdf PDFX_def.ps file1.pdf file2.pdf ...

The result seems to be good enough for Blurb to accept the result (the run an online PDF verifier).

I've attached the contents of my PDFX_def.ps in case anyone is interested.


[attachment deleted by admin]

oscillator

This is the reply from the PDFTK developer:

"I suspect that the output PDF still fits within the constraints of PDF/X-3, but that pdftk omitted the document-level markers that indicate PDF/X-3 conformance. This document-level information /is/ required, so its omission breaks the PDF/X-3 conformance of the output.

So pdftk is making PDFs that aren't PDF/X-3, and I don't see an easy way to fix that."

The error messages from Acrobat Pro X seems to confirm this.