PDF policy-based validation demo, veraPDF

About

Simple shell script that demonstrates policy-based validation of PDF documents using VeraPDF. Each file with a .pdf extension in a user-defined directory is analysed with VeraPDF, and assessed against a user-specified schema (which represents a policy).

Author

Johan van der Knijff, KB/National Library of the Netherlands

Dependencies

• VeraPDF (tested with version 1.4.7) + dependencies (Java)
• python (tested with version 2.7.6)

Contents of this repo

• policyValidate.sh: demo script

• postprocessing.py: Python script that post-processes the veraPDF output file

• schemas: example schemas (currently only one)

• examples: example output files

VeraPDF configuration

The policy-based validation uses the VeraPDF feature-extraction switch. In order for this to work correctly, activate reporting of the following features by editing VeraPDF's configuration file as below (can also be done from GUI / Config menu):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<featuresConfig>
    <enabledFeatures>
        <feature>ANNOTATION</feature>
        <feature>DOCUMENT_SECURITY</feature>
        <feature>EMBEDDED_FILE</feature>
        <feature>FONT</feature>
        <feature>INFORMATION_DICTIONARY</feature>
    </enabledFeatures>
</featuresConfig>

Command line use

Usage

policyValidate.sh pdfDir policy suffixOut

Positional arguments

pdfDir : input directory (directory is not processed recursively!)

policy : schematron file that defines the policy (see example in the schemas directory)

suffixOut : suffix that is used as base name for output files

Output

The script produces the following output files:

• suffixOut_out.xml: output file of VeraPDF
• suffixOut_san.xml: sanitised version of VeraPDF output file. For each PDFit only contains the Policy Report, with duplicate instances of failed checks removed.
• suffixOut_summary.csv: comma-delimited file with for each PDF the file reference, followed by the description of each unique failed validation rule (taken from message element in VeraPDF output).

See also the files in the examples directory of this repo.

Example

The following command processes all files in the directory ~/acroEngineering/fonts:

policyValidate.sh ~/acroEngineering/fonts demo-policy.sch fonts