veraPDF 1.24 released

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to announce that the full veraPDF 1.24 release is out now! veraPDF is an open-source, industry-supported PDF/A validator and part of the OPF reference toolset.

This release is made up of enhancements, technical maintenance and bug fixes:

  • Added support for the processing of PDFs within zip archives.
  • The GUI now has a cancel button to allow the user to halt processing.
  • The new –progress parameter enables command line progress reporting.
  • A new –config parameter allows users to pass their own configuration files, plus various bug fixes around configuration handling.
  • Support for Jakarta and Spring Boot 3 for Java 11+.
  • Support for JSON feature reporting.
  • Support for PDF 2.0 namespace and standard structure elements with additional PDF parsing bug fixes.
  • Fixes of unhandled exceptions in malicious PDFs.
  • Assorted minor bug fixes.

To learn more about the new fixes and features, read the release notes.

veraPDF 1.22 released

This release is made up of enhancements, technical maintenance and bug fixes:

  • The command line application can now produce JSON and HTML reports.
  • The user can now specify a custom location for the configuration directory.
  • Allow the user fine-grained control of warnings verbosity and visibility.
  • Improvements to some error messages with additional context reporting.
  • Support for the evaluation of PDF functions.
  • PDF 2.0 namespace and standard structure element types support.
  • Various font handling improvements.
  • Support for Java 17 and the Java Platform Module System (JPMS).

Download veraPDF 1.22

Read the release notes

View our user guides and documentation

Report an issue or request a new feature

veraPDF 1.20 released

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to announce that veraPDF 1.20 has been released following community testing. veraPDF is an open source, industry-supported PDF/A validator and part of the OPF reference toolset.

veraPDF 1.20 introduces support for PDF/A-4 (ISO 19005-4:2020) including core requirements, Level F (file attachments) and Level E (engineering). It also now supports Java versions from 8 to 16. 

Download veraPDF 1.20

Read the release notes

View our user guides and documentation

Report an issue or request a new feature

Thanks

Our thanks go to all contributors and testers, particularly the Dual Lab development team.

About veraPDF

veraPDF is an open source PDF/A validator, covering all parts of the PDF/A standards. Originally funded by the PREFORMA project, veraPDF has been sustained and maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation since 2017. Dual Lab provides active user support and carries out maintenance and bug fixes. The PDF Association’s PDF/A Technical Working Group continues in its role resolving ambiguities arising from veraPDF’s usage in the field.

veraPDF is free to download, use and to modify to meet your needs. However, there are ongoing costs to host and maintain it. If you use veraPDF, please consider supporting its development by becoming an OPF member or making a donation.

Subscribe to the veraPDF user mailing list.

veraPDF 1.14 released

The Open Preservation Foundation is pleased to announce that veraPDF 1.14 has been released.

veraPDF is an open source, industry supported PDF/A validator, and part of the OPF reference toolset.

This release contains a number of bug fixes and feature requests including the latest resolutions from the Validation Technical Working Group of the PDF Association. All jars and applications have been signed in this release and we have also made significant improvements to the performance of the software.

Download veraPDF 1.14.

Read the release notes.

Take a look at our user guides and documentation.

To report an issue or request a new feature, please use the project’s GitHub issue tracker.

Thanks

Our thanks go to all the contributors, particularly the Dual Lab Development Team and the OPF Product Board for their ongoing input and feedback.

About veraPDF

veraPDF is the first complete open source PDF/A validator, covering all parts of the PDF/A standards. Funding from the PREFORMA project ended in 2017 and veraPDF is now sustained and maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation. Dual Lab provides active user support and carries out maintenance and bug fixes. The PDF Association’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group continues in its role resolving ambiguities arising from veraPDF’s usage in the field, and promoting adoption of PDF/A and veraPDF by developers worldwide.

veraPDF is open source, free to download, to use and to modify. However, it is not free to host, maintain, support or develop. veraPDF is a widely-used digital preservation tool, but currently, only OPF members support veraPDF financially as part of their membership fees. If you use veraPDF, please consider supporting its development by becoming an OPF member or making a donation towards development.

Subscribe to the veraPDF user mailing list.

veraPDF 1.14 release candidate available for community testing

The first release candidate for veraPDF 1.14 is now available for community testing.

veraPDF is an open source, industry supported PDF/A validator, and part of the OPF reference toolset.

This release contains a large number of bug fixes and feature requests including the latest resolutions from the Validation Technical Working Group of the PDF Association. We have also made significant improvements to the performance of the software.

The draft release notes document all the fixes and features.

Feedback welcome

We invite the community to download and test the release candidate. If you think you find a bug, please report it on the veraPDF issue tracker on GitHub or contact us with any feedback.

We will also continue internal testing of the release candidate and there may be a few small changes before the public production release.

Our thanks go to all the contributors, particularly the Dual Lab Development Team and the OPF Product Board for their ongoing input and feedback.

About veraPDF

veraPDF is the first complete open source PDF/A validator, covering all parts of the PDF/A standards. Funding from the PREFORMA project ended in 2017 and veraPDF is now sustained and maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation. Dual Lab provides active user support and carries out maintenance and bug fixes. The PDF Association’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group continues in its role resolving ambiguities arising from veraPDF’s usage in the field, and promoting adoption of PDF/A and veraPDF by developers worldwide.

veraPDF is open source, free to download, to use and to modify. However, it is not free to host, maintain, support or develop. veraPDF is a widely-used digital preservation tool, but currently, only OPF members support veraPDF financially as part of their membership fees. If you use veraPDF, please consider supporting its development by becoming an OPF member or making a donation towards development.

Subscribe to the veraPDF user mailing list.

veraPDF announced as finalist for the Digital Preservation Awards 2018

On behalf of the veraPDF consortium, the Open Preservation Foundation is delighted to announce that veraPDF has won a place in the finals for the Software Sustainability Institute’s Award for Research and Innovation.

The prestigious Digital Preservation Awards is a world-wide celebration of significant and state-of-the-art contributions to securing our digital legacy. This year the exciting process will culminate in a spectacular awards ceremony in Amsterdam, as part of an International Conference hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Amsterdam Museum on World Digital Preservation Day (previously International Digital Preservation Day) on Thursday 29th November 2018.

Chair of the judges and Head of Technology for BBC Information and Archives Steve Daly said: “Year on year we receive more and more nominations from around the world, and this year was no exception. The judges had an enormous challenge deciding on a set of finalists, when the quality of all applications was so outstanding.”

Executive Director of OPF Martin Wrigley said: “I’m thrilled to see the recognition of the great work that has gone into veraPDF to make it such an essential digital preservation tool and would like to thank the Digital Preservation Awards judges and the DPC for this honour.”

Finalists for the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Award for Research and Innovation are (in no particular order):

  • ePADD, Stanford University
  • veraPDF, Open Preservation Foundation on behalf of the veraPDF Consortium
  • ‘Digital Curation: Contributions towards Defining the Discipline,’ Dr. Sarah Higgins – Aberystwyth University
  • Flashback: Preservation of legacy digital collection, The British Library

Read more about the Digital Preservation Awards 2018 finalists

Sponsor of the Award for Research and Innovation, Neil Chue Hong of the Software Sustainability Institute said: “I am delighted to be able to share the work of our finalists. Each one demonstrates world-class innovation and research which has the potential to benefit the entire digital preservation community.”

The Digital Preservation Awards is supported by some of the leading organizations in digital preservation.

veraPDF 1.12 release from the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF)

The latest version of veraPDF is now available to download.

veraPDF is an open source PDF/A validator, and a component of the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) reference toolset.

veraPDF 1.12 features multi-threaded support and parallelization in the command line interface, significantly improving performance.

A number of other fixes and improvements have been made to the software which are documented in the latest release notes (see below).

Supporting veraPDF – we need your help…

veraPDF is open source, free to download, use and modify. However, there are costs to host, maintain, support and develop the software. Currently OPF members support veraPDF financially as part of their membership fees.

You can help sustain veraPDF and its maintenance and development by:

Release notes: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest.

Download veraPDF: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip.

Getting started

User guides and documentation are published at: http://docs.verapdf.org.

Feedback

If you experience problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues.

About OPF and veraPDF

veraPDF is maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation (http://verapdf.org).

veraPDF (https://verapdf.org) is an open source, industry supported PDF/A validator covering all parts and levels of the PDF/A specification. It was originally developed with funding from the PREFORMA project (http://www.preforma-project.eu)

Subscribe to the veraPDF user list at: http://lists.verapdf.org.

Subscribe to OPF news, blogs and event updates at: http://verapdf.org/subscribe.

veraPDF 1.10 released on International Digital Preservation Day

The latest version of veraPDF is now available to download. veraPDF is an open source PDF/A validator, and version 1.10 marks the first release of veraPDF as part of the Open Preservation Foundation’s (OPF) reference toolset.

This release has improved optimisation for the creation and cleanup of temporary files and parsing of text-related data in PDF documents. It also fixes some minor issues that users who have upgraded to Java version 9 may have encountered, including a failure to start. There are also a number of other fixes and improvements which are documented in the latest release notes.

Release notes
https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest.

Download veraPDF
http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip.

Feedback

Most of the changes in this release are in response to the constructive feedback we’ve received from our users. Testing and user feedback is key to improving the software. Please download and use the latest release. If you experience problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues.

Getting started
User guides and documentation are published at: http://docs.verapdf.org/.

Support veraPDF

veraPDF is open source, free to download, to use and to modify. However, it is not free to host, maintain, support or continue to develop the software. Currently only OPF members support veraPDF financially as part of their membership fees.

How can you help?

  • Become an OPF member;
  • Make a donation to OPF and veraPDF development;
  • Volunteer your time and skills by improving the software and documentation.

https://verapdf.org/donate/

About veraPDF

veraPDF was originally funded by the PREFORMA project (http://www.preforma-project.eu/). PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) was a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme. The project’s main aim was to address the challenge of implementing standardised file formats for preserving digital objects in the long term, giving memory institutions full control over the acceptance and management of preservation files into digital repositories. veraPDF is now maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation (http://verapdf.org/).

Subscribe to the veraPDF mailing list at: http://lists.verapdf.org/.

Recording and slides published from ‘Life After PREFORMA: the future of veraPDF’ webinar

The materials from our latest webinar are now available.

This webinar presented the results of recent development and our plans for life after PREFORMA. It covered:

  • Improvements to the veraPDF policy checker aimed to make it easier for users to create custom policies.
  • Real world policies produced by the veraPDF consortium for PREFORMA acceptance testing.
  • Common validation issues, particularly around PDF/A’s Unicode requirements.
  • Our plans for the future, including feature reporting for PDF 2.0 and support arrangements for the veraPDF project.

Session leads

Carl Wilson, Open Preservation Foundation
Boris Doubrov, Dual Lab

Recording and Slides

veraPDF Life after PREFORMA recording
veraPDF Life after PREFORMA slides

Sign up for our next webinar: Life after PREFORMA, the future of veraPDF

19 September | 15:00 CEST

The PREFORMA project that commissioned and funded the development of veraPDF draws to an end this year. Recent activity has been focused on PREFORMA acceptance testing, formalising the decisions of the PDF Association’s Technical Working Group and fixing issues reported by the community. In this webinar, we’ll be presenting the results of recent development and presenting our plans for life after PREFORMA. Specifically, we’ll be covering:

  • Improvements to the veraPDF policy checker aimed to make it easier for users to create custom policies.
  • Real world policies produced by the veraPDF consortium for PREFORMA acceptance testing.
  • Common validation issues, particularly around PDF/A’s Unicode requirements.
  • Our plans for the future, including feature reporting for PDF 2.0 and support arrangements for the veraPDF project.

Session leads
Carl Wilson, Open Preservation Foundation
Boris Doubrov, Dual Lab

Registration
There are 50 places available, allocated on a first come, first served basis. Please register at: https://openpreservation.clickmeeting.com/life-after-preforma-the-future-of-verapdf/register

Date and time
The webinar takes place on Tuesday 19 September at 15:00 CEST and will last approximately one hour.