veraPDF accepted for PREFORMA Phase 3 acceptance testing

The veraPDF consortium has announced that it has successfully completed PREFORMA's prototyping phase, and has now been awarded the contract for the final six month testing phase.

veraPDF is an open-source industry-supported PDF/A validator supporting all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The project is led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association. The software is available under a MPLv2+/GLPv3+ license.

The acceptance testing phase focuses on five key areas:

• Acceptance testing with the PREFORMA consortium, automating the testing process and the reporting of results;
• Identifying any issues with the veraPDF corpora, such as ambiguities or omissions, and working with the PDF Association Technical Working Group to resolve the issues and supply additional files;
• Fixing bugs, optimising performance, and reviewing feature and enhancement requests to produce a product roadmap;
• Improving documentation, and continuing work on the veraPDF validation rule wiki to provides contextual information about errors raised: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-validation-profiles/wiki/PDFA-Part-1-rules;
• Community building, outreach and training.

Phase 3 runs from February 1 - July 30, 2017. Users are strongly encouraged to report bugs or other concerns to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues.

veraPDF 1.0 was released in January 2017. Download the software:

• Version using the PDFBox parser: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip
• Version using the veraPDF consortium's "greenfield" parser:

Release notes may be found at: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest

The PDF Association's PDF Validation Technical Working Group (TWG) continues to prepare a Technical Note highlighting the ambiguities uncovered during development of veraPDF, and their corresponding resolutions. The organisation plans to publish TechNote 0010 in Q1 of 2017.

Getting started

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

If you encounter problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues, or contact us through our mailing list: http://lists.verapdf.org/listinfo/users.

PREFORMA Innovation Workshop, 7 March, Padova

To find out more about PREFORMA and its three conformance checkers, sign up for the PREFORMA Innovation workshop. The aim of the workshop is to highlight the importance of standardisation and file format validation for the long term preservation of digital cultural content, and the business models that can be built around them. Registration closes 3 March.

About

The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project. PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

Find out more

Webinar: Watch the recording and slides from veraPDF's latest webinar.

PDF Days Europe 2017: We'll be there to talk about veraPDF!