The world of ISO standards development does not proceed very quickly unless there is substantial vendor demand in the first instance. In this case, the first formal communication between the veraPDF consortium’s effort to build an industry-supported validator for PDF/A and the ISO working group responsible for PDF/A occurred during the ISO TC 171 meetings in San Jose, CA in April, 2015.

In the lead-up to this meeting the PDF Association’s PDF Validation TWG created and posted several comments for review by the ISO TC 171 SC 2 WG 5 committee responsible for PDF/A. Additional questions were also put to the WG 8 committee, responsible for ISO 32000, the PDF specification.

As the TWG studied PDF/A in detail, and as discussed i the PDF/A Competence Centre’s Application Notes for PDF/A,  it became clear that there were several areas of ambiguity, especially in part 1 of ISO 19005. During the April meeting in San Jose the PDF Validation TWG submitted questions and received direction on the following key points of interest:

• That existing Parts of PDF/A will not be amended via corrigenda or otherwise.
• That the PDF Validation TWG may, as a body, supply proposed revisions to working text for a new Part of PDF/A.
• The PDF Validation TWG submitted several proposed enhancements for a new Part of PDF/A addressing ambiguities in existing specifications. The first formal ISO meeting to address PDF/A-next will be held in Basel, Switzerland in November, 2015.

The veraPDF consortium will discuss development of a proposal to ISO to request permission to establish the PDF Association’s PDF Validation TWG and the veraPDF software it approves as normative references for PDF/A-next.

The generic nature of veraPDF’s design make it highly amenable to other file-format validators, including other PDF subset standards, PDF itself, and other, non-PDF formats. We hope the community will see veraPDF as a building-block for more comprehensive PDF validation.

In his article on pdfa.org, veraPDF architect Boris Doubrov outlines the veraPDF model. In particular, he highlights the fact that:

• veraPDF is a purpose-built validator, not a parser adapted to validation purposes
• the veraPDF model is entirely generic, able to accommodate the variety of data structures possible within PDF
• veraPDF development includes the PDF Validation TWG in its process

Read more

The veraPDF consortium project was created by and, fundamentally for the archivist community. The PREFORMA project funds three initiatives to create open-source validators for certain key file formats: PDF/A, TIFF and FFV1 and Matroska, for video content.

The PDF Association’s interest in the veraPDF project stems from the PDF technology industry’s collective interest in the highest possible degree of interoperability between PDF production, processing, display and other software.

PDF/A, with a strict set of requirements and limitations, provides the archival subset of PDF targeted by the PREFORMA project funding veraPDF.

The need for improved general understanding of PDF/A was established with the first Isartor Test Suite project, almost ten years ago. Isartor covered only PDF/A-1b, and today there are 3 parts of PDF/A, and 8 conformance levels. veraPDF will provide a complete test-suite for all of these.

How veraPDF fits into the standards process

The veraPDF consortium is a joint project that includes the PDF Association as a key member. Through the PDF Association, a Category A liaison with ISO’s TC 171, and it’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group, the veraPDF consortium will be able to address the ISO standards development process in several ways.

Enhanced feedback to the ISO delegates from the archivists’ perspective

• Seek specific guidance on questions regarding interpretation of current standards
• Ask specific questions designed to elicit commitments to address the ambiguity in any future part of the PDF/A specification
• Highlight problematic conceptual aspects of PDF/A to encourage the ISO committee to address them in some way

The veraPDF consortium’s strategy will be to:

• Establish a relationship between the PDF Association’s PDF Validation TWG, which is a new organization within the PDF Association, with the ISO WG (TC 1717 SC 2 WG 5) responsible for PDF/A
• Establish a routine in which the PDF Validation TWG brings matters of interpretation to the WG at each of its twice-annual meetings for review and discussion at the ISO level
• Provide a vehicle for determining and conveying industry-supported interpretations of PDF/A
• Provide a framework for extending veraPDF to cover the rest of ISO 32000 (the PDF specification itself)
• Provide a framework for extending veraPDF to address validation of any 3rd party data-structure that might occur in a PDF file

If veraPDF is successfully adopted, the principle effect will be that PDF/A software tends to agree with other PDF/A software about the PDF/A files they exchange, and archivists will have a new means of understanding PDF/A and PDF files. Success will be noticeable by what is absent – reduced conflicts between PDF/A software, and by the fact that PDF/A-based solutions become more reliable and useful in a variety of implementations.