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I completed a Beamer presentation and now I want to produce a PDF in compliance with PDF/A-3B. IMO Universal Accessibility is not useful for a presentation. For this type of task, I always used pdfx. But I think that \DocumentMetadata is a better choice nowadays. So consider the following MWE:

\errorcontextlines=200 \DocumentMetadata{ pdfversion=1.5, pdfstandard=A-3B, tagging=off } \documentclass[usepdftitle=false]{beamer} \usepackage{tikz} \begin{document} \begin{frame} This is a frame. This is a rectangle \tikz \path[fill=red,draw=blue] (0,0) rectangle (1,1);. \end{frame} \end{document}

I read documentmetadata-support but it doesn't state if tagging key has a default value. So I wanted to be sure that tagging mechanism was disabled and I made explicit tagging=off. Unfortunately, compilation failed:

./foo.tex:11: Undefined control sequence. <argument> \ERROR \cs_set_eq:NN \__fnote_tmp:w \exp_stop_f: \use_ii:nn #1#2->#2 \__fnote_patch: ...__fnote_tmp:w \exp_stop_f: }}}} \tl_set:Nf \l__fnote_patch... \__hook begindocument ...ntext {\__fnote_patch: }} \providecommand \hyper@lin... \document ...ument \UseOneTimeHook {begindocument} \@kernel@after@begindocume... l.11 \begin{document}

as always with

latexmk --halt-on-error --file-line-error -pdflualatex=/usr/local/texlive/2025/bin/x86_64-linux/lualatex -lualatex ./foo.tex

Removing tagging=off, the issue disappears.

So is it safe to remove tagging= key to produce a PDF in compliance with PDF/A?

Looking into the pdfinfo -meta output it seems that this MWE is only in compliance with PDF/A-3B as verified by veraPDF. So the answer to the above question should be yes.

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    well, beamer is not compatible with tagging, which is why a new class is being developed to replace it. obviously this also means the developers do not agree with you about the accessibility of presentations. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by 'safe'. are you worried it might get tagged by default? tagging is not enabled by default; it must be enabled explicitly. Commented Jun 24 at 0:10
  • @cfr Thanks for your answer. You understood correctly. At the moment I still continue to use beamer because ltx-talk is highly experimental and (obviously) it isn't present on CTAN. I thought that tagging=off was a way to explicitly disable tagging, at least I understood this reading documentmetadata-support and LT News 41. Commented Jun 24 at 0:37
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    tagging=off is not equivalent to not passing the option at all. code is added into the begindocument hook which is absent if the option is not used. this is presumably incompatible with beamer. so if you do not want tagging anyway, it would be safer not to use the tagging key at all. Commented Jun 24 at 1:00
  • Basically aplying \DocumentMetadata at all rediefines lots of stuff, and tagging = off adds more (we are working out how to move this forward a bit more) - beamer is simply not compatible with any of the new code at all. Commented Jun 24 at 4:23

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The tagging key loads code that changes many things (including footnotes) to support tagging. This code is not compatible with all classes or packages.

If you want "only" to set a PDF standard, you only need the PDF management, which you get currently by using \DocumentMetadata without the tagging key.

But it is planned to extend \DocumentMetadata to load more of the tagging support code automatically, so there is no guarantee that it will stay compatible with beamer.

So starting with the next update of the PDF management (in a few days) we will offer an option to load only the PDF management. Then you will be able to do

\RequirePackage{pdfmanagement} \SetKeys[document/metadata]{pdfversion=1.7,pdfstandard=a-3b} \documentclass[usepdftitle=false]{beamer}

Notes: I would recommend to use the PDF version 1.7. And be aware that setting the standard doesn't guarantee that the PDF is standard compliant. LaTeX cannot check or enforce everything. You will have to validate with veraPDF.

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