Apache PDFBox

= Description = According to the PDFBox website: "The Apache PDFBox™ library is an open source Java tool for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents. Apache PDFBox also includes several command line utilities".

Although a range of these facilities may prove useful for preservation purposes, such as PDF debugging or extracting text, it is the Preflight component that supports the validation of a PDF against the PDF/A-1 or PDF/A-1b standards that has attracted considerable interest from preservation practitioners (see below).

= User Experiences =
 * Identification of PDF preservation risks using the Preflight component of PDFBox in three parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
 * Applied in an AQuA Mashup to address the preservation Issue: Detect, extract and analyse embedded objects in PDFs.
 * Successfully applied by the British Library for characterising PDFs.
 * Developed into a PDF long term risk detector at a SPRUCE hackathon.

= Development Activity =