cc @LaurenzV

Disclaimer: Apart from the Typst issue where you list some of the points needed to get the compliance, I'm not very familiar with them.

I personally feel like this crate is at the wrong level of abstraction to implement PDF/A compliance checks. pdf-writer operates at a very low-level, and all it should do is to provide all the necessary APIs to write PDFs (including what is necessary for certain compliance levels). Apart from some very basic validity checks that already exists (like duplicate references), I don't think it makes sense to implement validation at this level. For one thing because it could pollute the API for consumers that don't need it, but also because I don't think that all of the checks can happen in this crate, although as mentioned I don't know the specifics of the PDF/A spec (for example, iirc there is a clause that the .notdef glyph must not appear, I don't think it's sensible to check in pdf-writer whether a glyph actually exists in a font, as this would require parsing the font here). And having some checks being done in pdf-writer while others need to be done by the upstream consumer doesn't feel like a very clean separation and could lead to confusion.

So I think that for now, those checks should to be performed in Typst, and in the future all of this will hopefully be moved into a more higher-level PDF-drawing crate. But just my two cents!

Regarding q-nesting level, is it really as easy as checking the q's in a single content stream? I would have thought that the purpose of such a restriction is to prevent stack-explosion, but if the q-nesting level is just counted separately in each content stream, one could invoke an XObject instead and then basically reset the q-nesting level. Am I missing something here? As mentioned, unfortunately I don't have access to the spec.

I definitely can see your points!

Clause 6.1.13 of the PDF/A-2 standard just says "A conforming file shall not nest q/Q pairs by more than 28 nesting levels."
For the origin, of these requirements, it states that "this requirement makes normative a recommendation from ISO 32000-1:2008, C.2."

If we have a look at that table in the PDF 1.7 spec, it has this to say on q/Q-nesting:

So I don't think referenced XObjects count, although I am not completely sure. I tried to check with the PDF/A-4 spec for clarification but it dropped the whole implementation limits clause. The PDF 2.0 spec also just states in its annex C that previous versions were limited to nesting depth 28 but this one is not so...

Most of these changes seem very valuable. I especially like all the new notes regarding PDF/A compliance.

But I agree with @LaurenzV that the compliance checks seem out of place here. In my ("pdf-unexperianced") opinion, the checks should be separated from the other additions and added documentation. They could be discussed further, while the rest of this PR, in my opinion, could be merged as is.

Note though, that I am very new to PDF/A (and to be honest, to PDF in general).