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veraPDF

veraPDF Consortium
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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About

Launched: 2017
Record Updated: Jul 15, 2025
Digital preservation tool
Standard, specification or protocol
Designed to meet the needs of digital preservationists, and supported by leading members of the PDF software developer community, veraPDF is a purpose-built, open source, permissively licensed file-format validator covering all PDF/A parts and conformance levels, as well as PDF/UA (parts 1 and 2) Machine checks.
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Mission

The veraPDF consortium’s objective is to deliver PDF/A validation software accepted and supported by the PDF technology industry.

Key Achievements

PDF-UA support has been added over recent releases including PDF-UA/2 at draft stage, in March 2024. Full PDF checking based on the Arlington PDF model released in September 2024: https://openpreservation.org/news/arlington-pdf-model-checker-released/
veraPDF v1.28 with updated PDF-UA support released May 2025.

Technical Attributes

Maintenance Status

Actively Maintained

Open Code Repository

Implemented
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Technical Documentation

Implemented
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Code License

Implemented
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Open API

Implemented
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Open Product Roadmap

Implemented
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Technical Attribute Statements

Programming Languages

  • java

Technology Readiness Level

  • Actual system proven in operational environment

Code Licenses Used

  • GNU General Public License (GPL)
Other:
Mozilla Public License v2+

Content Licensing

  • Creative commons licenses

Standards

Metadata

  • JSON
  • REST

Community Engagement

Code of Conduct

In Progress

Community Engagement

Implemented
Website (Opens in new window)

Community Statements

Community Engagement Activities

  • Development sprints
  • Interest, working, user, or advisory groups
  • Mailing lists and discussion forums (including Slack)
  • Staff roles with responsibility for community engagement
  • User research

Policies & Governance

Policies

Web Accessibility Statement

In Progress

Governance Structure & Processes

In Progress

Policy Statements

Board Structure

  • None

Community Governance

  • Formal

Additional Information

Organizational History

Initially funded by PREFORMA, an EU pre-procurement project in 2014. The veraPDF consortium was initially established by the Open Preservation Foundation in collaboration with the PDF Association. Dual Labs, a PDF development company based in Minsk, Belarus was also a founding member, brought in to work with the ISO technical committee resolving specification ambiguities, and carrying out the development work with OPF.
The first full release of veraPDF covered only PDF/A-1 to PDF/A-3 validation when funding concluded in 2017. Since then the consortium has continued to release software regularly, at least once a year, adding new PDF specifications as they are released.
veraPDF is accompanied by an extensive corpus of test PDFs that aim to check each PDF/A and PDF/UA specification clause. This corpus is now used throughout the industry, including by Adobe, to test the functionality of PDF/A and PDF/UA validation software.
veraPDF is also used by many open source software projects to test the quality of PDF/A and PDF/UA documents produced by OpenOffice, LibreOffice and LaTex.

Organizational Structure

Business or Ownership Model

Non-profit organization

Full-time Staff

1-5

Volunteers

0

Non-profit Status

Autonomous non-commercial organization

Current Affiliations

Open Preservation Foundation
PDF Association
Dual Labs

Funding

Primary Funding Source

  • Contributions

Funding Needs

We are fairly self sufficient but extra funding would allow us dedicated development staff, these are currently on a best effort basis.
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