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veraPDF has successfully completed the prototyping phase in the PREFORMA project and has been awarded the contract for the six month testing phase.

veraPDF is an open-source industry-supported PDF/A validator. Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, veraPDF validates all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A).

The testing phase will focus on five key areas:

• Acceptance testing with the PREFORMA consortium, automating the testing process and the reporting of results;
  
• Identifying any issues with the veraPDF corpora, such as ambiguities or omissions, and working with the PDF Association Technical Working Group to resolve the issues and supply additional files;
  
• Fixing bugs, optimising performance, and reviewing feature and enhancement requests to produce a product roadmap;
  
• Improving documentation, and continuing work on the veraPDF validation rule wiki to provides contextual information about errors raised: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-validation-profiles/wiki/PDFA-Part-1-rules;
  
• Community building, outreach and training.
  

Download veraPDF
veraPDF 1.0 was released in January 2017. Download the software at:

• PDFBox version: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip
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• Greenfield version: http://downloads.verapdf.org/gf/verapdf-gf-installer.zip
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Release notes: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest

Getting started
User guides and documentation are available at: http://docs.verapdf.org/.

If you encounter problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues, or contact us through our mailing list: http://lists.verapdf.org/listinfo/users.

PREFORMA Innovation Workshop, 7 March, Padova
To find out more about PREFORMA and the three conformance checkers, sign up for the PREFORMA Innovation workshop: http://www.preforma-project.eu/workshop-in-padua.html.  The aim of the workshop is to highlight the importance of standardisation and file format validation for the long term preservation of digital cultural content, and the business models that can be built around them. Registration closes 3 March.

About
The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project.PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme. The project’s main aim is to address the challenge of implementing standardised file formats for preserving digital objects in the long term, giving memory institutions full control over the acceptance and management of preservation files into digital repositories.