Archiving Contracts: Why PDF/A Exists and When You Actually Need It

A contract is a record. The dispute, the audit, the due diligence on a sale — all of them happen years after signature, and all of them start with someone opening the file. An ordinary PDF is a reasonable bet for a decade. It is not a guarantee, and for records you are legally obliged to keep, the difference matters.

---

What can go wrong with an ordinary PDF

Fonts that are not in the file. A PDF can reference a font rather than embed it. Open it on a machine without that font and the reader substitutes another one. Line breaks move, tables shift, and in the worst case a page of text reflows into something that is not what was signed.

Colour that depends on the device. “This shade of red” means nothing without saying which red. Rarely important on a contract; occasionally important on a plan or a marked-up drawing attached to one.

Things that need the outside world. Embedded video, JavaScript, links to external files, content pulled from a URL. In ten years those are dead links inside a legal record.

Encryption you no longer have the key for. A password-protected archive is a lost archive as soon as the person who set the password leaves.

---

What PDF/A guarantees

PDF/A is the ISO subset of PDF designed for long-term preservation. It forbids all of the above, and requires the file to carry everything it needs to render itself:

• Every font embedded, so the document draws the same way anywhere
• A colour profile attached, so colours mean something specific
• No external dependencies, no scripts, no encryption
• Metadata inside the file saying what it is and which conformance level it claims

The practical claim is narrow and useful: this file will look the same in twenty years as it does today, opened by software that does not exist yet.

---

When you need it, and when you do not

Worth doing:

• Executed contracts you are required to retain — company law, tax, and employment records commonly run to six or seven years
• Anything filed with a court, registry or public authority, several of which require PDF/A and reject other formats
• Documents that may be evidence in a dispute
• The final signed version of anything material

Not worth doing:

• Drafts in circulation
• Documents you will edit again
• Anything with a life shorter than about a year

PDF/A files are larger, because everything is embedded. That is the trade.

---

Converting one

PDF to PDF/A — upload the signed contract, get a PDF/A-2b file back. No account.

One thing worth knowing, because it is invisible if it goes wrong: converting to PDF/A can damage the text layer while leaving the pages looking perfect. The result opens, looks identical, and cannot be searched — which for an archive defeats the entire purpose, since an archive nobody can search is a filing cabinet. Non-Latin text is where this shows up first.

The conversion here preserves the text as it was rather than re-rendering the document when it does not have to. After converting anything in Russian, Uzbek or another non-Latin script, do the ten-second check anyway: open the result and Ctrl+F for a word from the middle of the document. If it is found, the archive is real.

---

Before you archive it

Two things worth doing first, in this order:

1. Make it searchable if any page is a scan. Archiving a picture of a contract preserves the picture and none of the content.
2. Merge the schedules in so the archived record is the complete agreement. A master agreement filed without Schedule 2 is a record of half a deal.

And if the contract is going into the archive because the relationship is ending, it is worth knowing what it actually said: a free review gives you six scores with the reasoning behind each, which is a faster way to remember what you agreed to than rereading forty pages.

---

What we keep

Nothing. Files sent to the free tools are converted in memory and handed straight back — never written to disk, never stored in a database. The document workspace holds a working copy for two hours so you can apply several operations without re-uploading, and deletes it.

Your archive is your archive.

---

Next step: convert a signed contract to PDF/A → — free, no account.