Hello,
I am experiencing a reproducible crash when converting Excel print jobs to PDF/A using PDFCreator.
Environment
- PDFCreator Free 6.2.2.4
- Windows 11
- Excel (printing from .xlsm file)
- Language: French
Problem
PDFCreator crashes with a System.NullReferenceException during PDF/A conversion.
The error consistently occurs at:
Start updateing XMP Metadata for PDF/A
Stack trace:
PdfProcessorBase.SignEncryptConvertPdfAAndWriteFile(Job job)
Observations
- Ghostscript execution is successful (
exit code 0) - Intermediate PDF is correctly generated
- Crash happens after Ghostscript, during XMP metadata update
- Happens with:
- PDF/A-1b
- PDF/A-2b
- PDF/A-3b
- Does NOT happen with standard PDF output
Important findings
- PDFCreator test page → PDF/A works correctly
- Issue only occurs with real Excel print jobs
- No document merging involved (single page job)
- Metadata fields in profile have been cleared (no tokens)
- Filename tokens removed as well
Additional context
This setup was working correctly until January 2026.
The Excel file has not changed since then.
Logs
(attach full log here)
Expected behavior
PDFCreator should successfully convert Excel print output to PDF/A as before.
Actual behavior
Crash with NullReferenceException during XMP metadata processing.
Question
Is this a known issue with PDF/A XMP handling in recent versions?
pdfcreator logs.txt (13.3 KB)