Error using Ghostscript to convert PDF to PDF/A - ghostscript

Question

I tried this command:
gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sProcessColorModel=DeviceRGB -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=/tmp/test/pdfa/pdftopdfa.pdf /tmp/test/pdftopdfa.pdf
But I got this error:
Artifex Ghostscript 9.14: Can't find initialization file gs_init.ps.
I tried another command:
gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=/tmp/test/pdfa/23238input.xml_2.pdf 23238input.xml_2.pdf
But i got this error:
Artifex Ghostscript 9.14 (2014-03-26) Copyright (C) 2014 Artifex
Software, Inc. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO
WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details. Can't find (or open)
initialization file (gs_std_e.ps) Unrecoverable error: undefined in
.uninstallpagedevice Operand stack: gs_std_e.ps gs_std_e.ps
gs_std_e.ps

Answer 1

Well firstly you are using an old version of Ghostscript, you should probably upgrade.
Secondly wherever you got it from, its non-standard because it has the PostScript resources stored on disk, the default is for them to be built into the binary as a ROM file system.
Finally it appears that the resources on disk are either missing or corrupted. You could search for them, they are usually in somewhere like /usr/local/bin/ghostpdl/Resource and then use the -I switch to present that path to Ghostscript so it knows where to look.
But since its an old version then I'd suggest you get the current version (9.21) instead. If you get a package, and that fails to work, then you should complain to the package maintainer. If you feel up to it you can simply clone the Ghostscript Git repository and build it yourself, its not hard if you have a working C compiler (gcc). Lastly, there are pre-built Linux binaries here which may work on your system, depending on what your setup is.
A couple of notes on your command line; you have not specified the PDFA_def.ps file which you will have to do in order to create a valid PDF/A file, see this documentation but note that's the current 9.21 docs. If you don't supply that file (properly modified from the supplied model) then you won't be able to create a conforming PDF/A file.
Do not use -dUseCIEColor unless you have a very good reason, if you don't know what it does (and I'm guessing you don't) then you don't have a good reason. If you use it without understanding you'll only adversely impact performance and possibly get poor colour reproduction.