BIOVIA Notebook

T29-2022 BIOVIA Notebook 2022 and higher, the PDF documents generated when submitting Experiments are not compliant with the PDF/A standard, due to a license issue with the PDF converter.

June 2022

Program

BIOVIA Notebook 2022 and higher, including all related Service Packs

Operating System

Microsoft Windows Server (64 bit), 2016 and 2019

Background

Notebook uses a third-party tool, 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter, for converting submission PDF documents to the PDF/A-2b standard. When renewing the license for this tool in April 2021, a license key was applied which is not compatible with the software version currently used with Notebook. As a consequence, the conversion fails and submission PDF documents generated by Notebook 2022 and 2022 SP1 are not fully PDF/A compliant, typically violating some rules for color table and metadata content.

To date, we have not observed or been made aware of any issues with reading or printing these documents. It is however possible that such issues will occur in the future, when using tools which require strict compliance with the standard.

Resolution

Apply the hot fix 2022 SP1 HF1

New experiments created and submitted after the upgrade are saved as PDF/A‑2b compliant documents.

Mitigation

This issue affects all submissions made after Notebook 2022 or 2022 SP1 was deployed until the hotfix is applied. Note that multiple submissions may have been made for a single experiment.

The stored submission PDF documents in the Notebook database should not be converted since this would invalidate author and co-signer signatures. If you want to create PDF/A compliant copies of the non-compliant submission PDF documents, after the hotfix is applied, then proceed as follows:

1. Identify the affected Experiments/Submissions:
   This may be done by the user opening submissions in the web client to check PDF/A compliance. Identifying and diagnosing all potentially affected experiments/submissions may be done using the Notebook API, possibly in combination with SQL queries. Please reach out to BIOVIA Support for details.
2. Create PDF/A compliant submission documents:
   This can be done by the author of the Experiment by cloning it and then submitting the clone. This will create compliant PDF/A documents but the signature date will obviously be the current date. Consider the following cases :
   
   • The experiment is fully submitted and one or more parts were submitted using Notebook 2022 or 2022 SP1
     Clone and re-submit
   • The experiment has only one submitted part which is in the counter-signing stage.
     No need to do anything special, a compliant, final PDF will be created when the experiment is countersigned.
   • The last submitted part is in the counter-signing stage, previous parts were submitted using Notebook 2022 or 2022 SP1
     Countersign the experiment, then clone and re-submit.
   • The experiment has unsubmitted sections and previous parts which were submitted using Notebook 2022 or 2022 SP1
     Wait until the experiment is fully submitted, then clone and re-submit

BIOVIA Support

If you have any questions, please contact BIOVIA Support