PDF/A Conversion and validation using PDFTron

[Support]

Q:

 

We are searching for tools that can help us convert PDF/A compatible files for our institutional repository.

The initial plan is to check the compatibility of the user uploaded file, then convert them if they are PDF/A convertible. So two functions are needed:

 

1) Is the file PDF/A convertible (only on pdf files, or can be doc and other formats?);

2) Convert the file to PDF/A, or reject submission due to file format.

Currently we have two questions:

 

1) Is “PDF/A Manager” application sufficient to do that or we need to purchase the whole “PDFNet SDK” package?

2) In the “PDFTron_PDFA_Manager_User_Manual”, some Java, C, examples are provided to show how to integrate PDF/A Manager functions, do you have any Perl samples?

3) The “PDF/A Manage command-line” application can convert the file and generate report.xml, is it possible to run the command-line application then get the compatibility return value other than parse the xml report?

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A:

 

Ø  1) Is “PDF/A Manager” application sufficient to do that or we need to purchase the whole “PDFNet SDK” package?

 

PDF/A Manager is a simple to use command-line application where is PDFNet SDK is a comprehensive SDK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_kit).

 

PDF/A Manager can only process PDF files, whereas ‘PDFNet SDK with Convert and PDF/A Add-ons’ could be used to convert many other document formats (e.g. Office, XPS, HTML, TXT, RTF. image, etc) to PDF or PDF/A  - (among other features - http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/features.html).

 

> 2) In the “PDFTron_PDFA_Manager_User_Manual”, some Java, C, examples are provided to show

> how to integrate PDF/A Manager functions, do you have any Perl samples?

 

Unfortunately we do not have Perl samples. I guess you could use simply use PDF/A utility and invoke the shell command from perl.

 

In case of PDFNet SDK we provide additional samples (C#, Java, VB.Net, C++, Python, PHP, Ruby, Objective-C), however Perl is not on the list

  http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#PDFA

 

Ø  3) The “PDF/A Manage command-line” application can convert the file and generate report.xml,

Ø  is it possible to run the command-line application then get the compatibility return value other than parse the xml report?

 

Unfortunately this is not supported with the command-line utility.

However, you can use PDFNet SDK (see pdftron.PDF.PDFA.PDFAComplaince) to interpret validation / conversion results without XML processing.