In Spain, to file lawsuits they require us to have OCR and PDF/A format. Also in other EU countries. As far as I know, the same it’s true for certain things in some US institutions like Harvard. I understand that OCR is not necessary when the pdf is generated directly from a word file (with save as pdf function), because it is already a searchable document and that it embeds the fonts automatically (contrary to if you want to send it as word doc, which you will have to specifically hit the font embed button to make sure fonts are embed). This is correct, right?
But, I don’t understand the requirement of PDF/A. I have searched about it and it is not clear to me why a pdf generated from a word would have a problem in the future, such as making the PDF/A ISO standard to ensure that it can be opened for a longer time. I also read that PDF/A secures the genuine content of the file so that it cannot be modified, but this is the same thing that the PDF format already does, right? I also know that certain functions are lost with PDF/A. Do you think it is necessary or convenient to save documents as PDF/A?