With “Scan to PDF/A” Adobe Acrobat provides a tool for getting analog documents into PDF—and for archiving also to PDF/A.
But there is one annoying problem if you want to have a “searchable” and PDF/A compliant PDF file:

If your analog document contains links, the OCR function will detect them and will create link annotations. But during the PDF/A conversion Acrobat does not set the “Print” flag (aka flag 3) for these link annotations, which is required by PDF/A standards.

A preflight to verify compliance with PDF/A-1b:2005 will show the following errors:

• Annotation has no Flags entry (x match[es] on x page[s])
  
  • PDF-based ISO standards require that the Flag entry is present for any annotation.
    
• Annotation not set to print (x match[es] on x page[s])
  • Some PDF-based ISO standards require that all annotations are set to print.

Example

• Sample document [PDF] (scanned, containing a link; OCR, PDF/A compliance enabled)
  

Details

Affected functions:

• Document > Scan to PDF > Custom Scan with
  • Make Searchable (Run OCR) and 
  • Make PDF/A compliant enabled
    

Tested versions:

• Windows
  • Adobe Acrobat 9.0.0

• Mac
  • ?
    

Status:

• Reported: Yes
• Replied: ?
• Fixed: ?

Workaround

•  Run the following preflight fixup rule after the scan: Set link annotations to “print” for PDF/A compliance [ZIP]
  

Links

• n/a