November 9, 2020 | New Features, PDF

New PDF/A validator

Hi Everyone!

We’re happy to announce our new PDF/A validator, available with the latest release.

Why is it important to validate PDF/A files?

Long term archiving is a critical requirement for many industries.

Because of the complexity of PDF document format, it is very important to validate if all the PDF/A specification requirements are met.

To be certain that the files created by the GdPicture.NET PDF/A converter engine are compliant with the PDF/A ISO standard (ISO 19005), we have developed a PDF/A validator.

The GdPicture.NET PDF/A validator features

The GdPicture.NET PDF/A validator provides conformance validation for all PDF/A versions:

PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005)
PDF/A-2 (ISO 19005-2:2011)
PDF/A-3 (ISO 19005-3:2012)

It automatically determines the claimed conformance of the document.

It provides both a basic validation result or a detailed machine-readable report (XML).

The engine analyses and validates the following elements:

PDF structure
lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels
metadata
fonts
color space
other properties

How to use the GdPicture.NET PDF/A validator?

The ValidatePDFA Method (GdPicturePDF) validates the currently loaded PDF document against the specified PDF/A standard and provides a validation report.

Here is an example on how to validate if the document conforms to the PDF/A-2b requirements:

using (GdPicturePDF oGdPicturePDF = new GdPicturePDF())
{
    string caption = "Example: ValidatePDFA";
    GdPictureStatus status = oGdPicturePDF.LoadFromFile("test.pdf", false);
    if (status == GdPictureStatus.OK)
    {
        bool ConformsToRequestedStandard = false;
        string XMLReport = string.Empty;
        status = oGdPicturePDF.ValidatePDFA(PdfValidationConformance.PDF_A_2b, ref ConformsToRequestedStandard, ref XMLReport);
        if (status == GdPictureStatus.OK)
        {
            if(ConformsToRequestedStandard)
            {
                MessageBox.Show("The PDF document does conform to the PDF/A-2b standard.", caption);
            }
            else
            {
                MessageBox.Show("The PDF document does not conform to the PDF/A-2b standard. Refer to the XML Report for further details.", caption);
            }
        }
        else
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Error occured durring the document validation process. Status: " + status.ToString(), caption);
        }
    }
    else
    {
        MessageBox.Show("The file can't be loaded. Status: " + status.ToString(), caption);
    }
}

You can check the full documentation in our reference guide.

You can also try our engine directly with your files below:

Have you already tried it? Let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Elodie

PDF/A