Ghostscript: Internal links annotations not-printing in PDF/A-1b

Question

i'm trying to generate a PDF/A-1b document with Ghostscript 9.18 from a batch of scanned document pages. I want to cover the scanned table of content with a layer of document internal links at the first page. But Ghostscript returns an error:

GPL Ghostscript 9.18: Annotation set to non-printing,
not permitted in PDF/A, annotation will not be present in output file

In commandline, i use:

gs \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dBATCH=true \
-dNOPAUSE=true \
-sPAPERSIZE=a4 \
-dSAFER=true \
-sColorConversionStrategy=UseDeviceIndependentColor \
-sOutputFile=out.pdf \
-dEmbedAllFonts=true \
-dPrinted=true \
-dPDFA=true \
-dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 \
-sPDFSETTINGS=screen \
-f raw.pdf \
-f meta.ps

Each link is defined like:

[ /Rect [ 10 10 100 100 ] /ScrPg 1 /Page 7 /Subtype /Link /ANN pdfmark

I've tried to force the printing with the /F 3 and /F 4 PDF flag for annotations and on gs level with -dPrinted=true without any success.

Is there an other way to generate internal links in an PDF/A file? Do i misunderstand the PDF/A standard?

Answer 1

There is no need to make your Link annotations non-printing. If you do not want them to have any visual appearance, just give them an appearance that does not draw anything (ie an empty appearance stream).

The PDF/A-1 standard mandates that all annotations that are visible (on screen) are also set to print (to ensure that the appearance of pages doesn't look different between display on a screen and printouts).

I unfortunately cannot help with how to use this information in or with GhostScript.