Create PDF/A-2b-Compliant Documents on a Mac: A Guide to Long-Term Archiving

Anyone who stores invoices, contracts, or business records electronically must comply with legal recordkeeping requirements.

In many sectors, a standardized format is required or recommended for long-term archiving: PDF/A (often PDF/A-2b).

The problem in practice: conventional scans, smartphone photos of receipts, or simple PDF exports are often image-only documents. They either lack a searchable text layer or do not meet the ISO requirements for long-term visual consistency – for example, because the fonts used are not embedded or transparencies are not fully defined. Anyone who files such documents unchanged runs the risk of formal deficiencies being found in audits, tax audits, or official proceedings.

Fortunately, creating PDF/A documents is easy. You can convert them manually using batch processing or have new scans processed automatically in the background using a hot folder (folder monitoring). We’ll show you both ways here.

OnDevice OCR Business is available both from the Mac App Store and as a direct download, and can be tried free of charge with a watermark.

Manual processing#

1. Download and install OnDevice OCR Business.

2. Open the app and either drag and drop the stack of documents into the window or select the files via “Choose Files…”.

   PDF, JPG, PNG, HEIC, and TIFF files can be converted to PDF/A-2b.

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3. Now turn on the “Create PDF/A” feature, then use “Choose Output Folder” to select the folder where you want the finished PDF/A files to be saved.
4. Finally, start text recognition and conversion by clicking “Start OCR”.

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Done

Your documents are now saved in ISO-compliant PDF/A-2b format.

Process scans automatically with OCR and save them as PDF/A#

1. Open OnDevice OCR Business. In the sidebar on the left, go to “Hot Folders” → “Add Folder”.

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2. In the first step, choose the folder where your scanner saves its documents.

   It can be on a NAS, in iCloud, on a connected drive, or locally on your Mac.

3. In the next step, optionally choose the output folder where the searchable PDF/A-2b files should be saved afterwards.

4. In the settings, turn on the “Create PDF/A-2b” feature and click “Add”.

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Done

You can now quit OnDevice OCR Business completely. From now on, the background service watches your scanner’s folder, and as soon as new documents are detected, they are immediately processed with OCR and saved as searchable PDF/A files.

Find out here how the “Name Files” and “Sort Files” features let you have your documents automatically named individually with templates based on the recognized text and filed straight into the right folders.

With the “Detect Separator Sheets” feature, you can also process large stacks of unrelated documents in one go.