title: Identification of preservation risks in PDF with Apache Preflight - a first impression
creators: Johan van der Knijff
abstract: <p>This report explores the feasibility of using the Apache Preflight PDF/A validator to detect &#39;risky&#39; features in &#39;regular&#39; (i.e. non-PDF/A) PDF documents.</p>
  
  <p>The specific objectives of this work were:</p>
  
  <ul>
  	<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To get a first impression of the Apache Preflight (part of PDFBox) PDF/A-1b validator.</li>
  	<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To investigate if Apache Preflight is able to detect unwanted (from a preservation point of view) features in PDF files (i.e. PDFs that are not necessarily of the PDF/A sub-type) such as password protection, encryption and non-embedded fonts.</li>
  	<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To provide a comparison with the Preflight module of Adobe Acrobat 9.5.</li>
  	<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To decide if doing more work on Apache Preflight (more elaborate testing, possible involvement in its development) are worthwhile.</li>
  </ul>
keywords: digital preservation