Detect PDF/A document

Bug #373445 reported by Davide Capodaglio
12
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Evince
Fix Released
Wishlist
evince (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: evince

Evince does not correctly identify PDF/A documents and reports PDF-1.4 (in File / Properties).
Since PDF/A is an important international standard it would be useful to correctly identify a conforming document, as Adobe Reader does for example.

Revision history for this message
Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout) wrote :

davide, can you please attach an example pdf/a document to test?
thank you

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod) wrote :

Attached a simple PDF generated with OpenOffice PDF Export function, with "PDF/A-1a" option.
Adobe Reader 9.1 correctly reports PDF/A compliance mode.

Revision history for this message
Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod) wrote :

I think this should be reported upstream to poppler, so that this improvement could be made also to other tools, like "pdfinfo" for example.
(Okular reports PDF-1.4 like Evince, too)

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

do you have any issue with the rendering or is that just the label in the details dialog which is your issue? how useful is that information? that's seems really a tiny detail and should be sent upstream by somebody who cares about that

Revision history for this message
Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod) wrote :

No I don't have any rendering issue.
But PDF/A has become an international standard for "the long-term archiving of electronic documents" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A).
For example in Italy this format is required by many public organizations (Trade Bureau and many others).
So it's important to know when a document is conforming to the standard, and knowing that it is a "PDF-1.4" is too generic.

Moreover, it should be simple to determine the PDF/A compliance, since the PDF contains a special metadata for this.
If you open the attached PDF with a simple text editor, you can find this:
(note the xmlns:pdfaid="http://www.aiim.org/pdfa/ns/id/" namespace, as stated in wikipedia article)

21 0 obj
<</Type/Metadata/Subtype/XML/Length 3072>>
stream
<?xpacket begin="" id="W5M0MpCehiHzreSzNTczkc9d"?>
<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/">
 <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
      xmlns:pdfaid="http://www.aiim.org/pdfa/ns/id/">
   <pdfaid:part>1</pdfaid:part>
   <pdfaid:conformance>A</pdfaid:conformance>
  </rdf:Description>
  <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
   <dc:creator>
    <rdf:Seq>
     <rdf:li>Davide Capodaglio</rdf:li>
    </rdf:Seq>
   </dc:creator>
  </rdf:Description>
  <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
     xmlns:pdf="http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/">
   <pdf:Producer>OpenOffice.org 3.1</pdf:Producer>
  </rdf:Description>
  <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
    xmlns:xmp="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/">
   <xmp:CreatorTool>Writer</xmp:CreatorTool>
   <xmp:CreateDate>2009-05-08T11:39:29+02:00</xmp:CreateDate>
  </rdf:Description>
 </rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>

Revision history for this message
Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout) wrote :

I can confirm this, in latest Jaunty. Tested also with xpdf, epdfview and okular, none of them will detect pdf/a compliance anywhere.
AdobeReader9 will display a bar as in the attached screenshot.
This should be reported upstream, in case not already done

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod) wrote :

I produced a patch that adds PDF/A detection capability to evince, by examining the xml metadata as stated in www.pdfa.org specification.
I will also post this upstream.
Comments appreciated :)

Revision history for this message
Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout) wrote :

Thank you, Davide, that's excellent!
Please let us know when you do.

Revision history for this message
Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod) wrote :

I added this to bugzilla, including patch
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=582206

I attached a sample of evince showing PDF/A version.

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Ubuntu Desktop Bugs (desktop-bugs)
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Changed in evince:
status: Unknown → New
Revision history for this message
Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod) wrote :

This has been fixed upstream, my patch has been approved and so will be in GNOME 2.28!

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
Changed in evince:
status: New → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package evince - 2.27.3-0ubuntu1

---------------
evince (2.27.3-0ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  * New upstream version (LP: #387676):
    New Features and UI Improvements:
    - Update the hildon port (Christian Persch)
    - Complete the win32 port (#339172, Hib Eris)
    - Allow activate the menubar in fullscreen mode (#504243, Carlos
      Garcia Campos)
    - Do not create popup window if the annot doesn't have a popup
      (Carlos Garcia Campos)
    - Add tests for printer settings (#583976, Bartek Kostrzewa)
    - Remember and reuse "Save a Copy..." path (#485195, Carlos Garcia Campos) (LP: #151079)
    - Support for cb7 using the p7zip commands in comics backend
      (#565174, Juanjo Marín)
    - Parse xml metadata to detect PDF/A documents (#582206, Davide Capodaglio) (LP: #373445)
    Bug fixes:
    - Several build fixes and improvements (Christian Persch)
    - Fix page transitions in presentation mode (#583652, #581881,
      Carlos Garcia Campos) (LP: #383309, LP: #373741)
    - Scale according to paper size before rendering for printing
      (Carlos Garcia Campos)
    - Fix multipage even/odd printing issues (#583429, #583388, Bartek
      Kostrzewa)
    - Gracefully work with FITB destinations and friends (#583276,
      Matthias Drochner)
    - Fix double to int conversion in thumbnails_get_dimensions
      (#581524, Carlos Garcia Campos)
    - Other bugs fixed: #584617, #585497
  * debian/control.in: Bump GTK+ depends to 2.14
  * debian/patches/01_launchpad.patch:
  * debian/patches/99_autoconf.patch:
    - Rebuilt

 -- Robert Ancell <email address hidden> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:52:57 +1000

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Changed in evince:
importance: Unknown → Wishlist
To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.