The VeraPDF Consortium has announced that it has begun the prototyping phase for a new open-source validator of PDF/A. This is a piece of the PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts) project; other branches will cover TIFF and audio-visual formats. Participants in VeraPDF are the Open Preservation Foundation, the PDF Association, the Digital Preservation Coalition, Dual Lab, and Keep Solutions.
Documents are available, including a functional and technical specification. It aims at being the “definitive” tool for determining if a PDF document conforms to the ISO 19005 requirements. It will separate the PDF parser from the higher-level validation, so a different parser can be plugged in.
Validating PDF is tough In JHOVE, I designed PDF/A validation as an afterthought to the PDF module. PDF/A requirements affect every level of the implementation, so that approach led to problems that never entirely went away. Making PDF/A validation a primary goal should help greatly, but having it sit on top of and independent from the PDF parser may introduce another form of the same problem.
PDF files can include components which are outside the spec, and PDF/A-3 permits their inclusion. This means that really validating PDF/A-3 is an open-ended task. Even in the earlier version of PDF/A, not everything that can be put into a file is covered by the PDF specification per se. The specification addresses this by providing for extensibility; add-ons can address these aspects as desired. In particular, the core validator won’t attempt thorough validation of fonts.
A Metadata Fixer will not just check documents for conformance, but in some cases will perform the necessary fixes to make a file PDF/A compliant.
JHOVE ignores the content streams, focusing only on the structure, so it could report a thoroughly broken file as well-formed and valid. JHOVE2 doesn’t list PDF in its modules. Analyzing the content stream data is a big task. In general, the project looks hugely ambitious, and not every ambitious digital preservation project has reached a successful end. If this one does, it will be a wonderful accomplishment.
Mad File Format Science 