veraPDF brings together memory institutions and industry for mutual benefit.

Reliability is in everyone’s interest

veraPDF stakeholders vary because so many different sorts of organisations rely on PDF documents in one way or another.

While veraPDF is designed to be useful to anyone seeking to understand the archival quality of their documents or the capabilities of their software, two particular communities are key to the development of veraPDF.

Memory institutions

The Open Preservation Foundation and Digital Preservation Coalition represent large and small institutions with a responsibility for managing digital archives. By working with our respective memberships and the community to gather policy and functional requirements, build test corpora, and carry out early testing of software releases, we will make the greatest use of the time and resources available to build a large community of practice around the veraPDF to ensure long term sustainability.

Memory institutions will be invited to contribute policy requirements and veraPDF will provide support in expressing these in the formal language of Policy Profiles. We will encourage the sharing of these exemplar Policy Profiles for testing and reuse by other institutions, both providing quality assurance of the policies and allowing common policy requirements to be identified across the community.

Commercial software developers

The PDF Association represents the developers who produce software that create, process and view PDFs. The software architecture and test files are approved by their Validation Technical Working Group (TWG).

The role of the TWG is to:

  • assemble interested parties to discuss strategy, policy and questions of interpretation;
  • provide an international forum for establishing industry consensus on veraPDF test files, software
  • messaging and message translation (localization or internationalization);
  • provide a formal vehicle for recording decisions and driving veraPDF findings to developers;
  • coordinate with the PDF and PDF/A TWGs and 3rd party organisations;
  • request clarifications and propose changes directly to the responsible ISO WG.

The test files are derived from existing collections already in use by the community, including the Isartor Test Suite, the Bavaria Test Suite with additions provided by the contracted lead developer and members of the PDF Validation TWG.

Join the veraPDF community today!