PDF Association publishes Technical Note 0010: Clarifications of ISO 19005, parts 1-3 for developers of PDF/A creators and validators

Berlin, Germany – August 4, 2017 – The PDF Association, a not-for-profit organization designed to foster universal public standards for PDF technology, today announced the publication of Technical Note 0010, a set of 29 exhaustively researched and peer-reviewed resolutions to a variety of ambiguities in the PDF/A specifications.

Technical Note 0010 was produced by the PDF Association’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group (TWG). The TWG developed this content in the context of an in-depth review of existing ISO 19005 (PDF/A) specifications conducted between October, 2014 and December, 2016 for the purpose of developing the open-source veraPDF test suite and veraPDF validation software. Ambiguities in PDF/A were identified by:

• Formally analyzing the PDF/A specifications in the process of implementing veraPDF
• Reviewing the performance of existing PDF/A validators
• Discussing the questions posted to the TWG mailing list
• Resolving controversial questions via a ballot

Boris Doubrov, PDF Association Board member and the technical lead on development of the veraPDF test suite said, “The veraPDF corpus continues the work of the PDF/A Competence Center’s Isartor Test Suite, but in a more comprehensive manner, and with complete coverage of all three current parts of PDF/A.”

Carl Wilson, Technical Lead for the Open Preservation Foundation, which led the veraPDF effort in collaboration with the PDF Association, said, “We’ve already seen rapid adoption of veraPDF. We fully expect to see the veraPDF software, which reflects the findings documented in TechNote 0010, used in most memory institutions handling electronic documents worldwide.”