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Issues Feed

2026-03-03 09:11:01: [PDFBOX-6172] PDF displays garbled characters in Adobe Reader but renders correctly in web browsers; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by bai yuan
2026-03-01 09:34:28: [PDFBOX-6171] Inverted images due to enlarged decode array; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Tilman Hausherr
2026-02-25 09:55:28: [PDFBOX-6170] Request to make PDDocument.getFontsToSubset() public; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Philip Helger
2026-02-25 09:53:23: [PDFBOX-6169] Request to make PDFont.encode public; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Philip Helger
2026-02-18 07:53:13: [PDFBOX-6168] Suppoert UTF-8 encoded strings as specified in PDF 2.0; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Andrea Vacondio

Description

	JAVA PDF library for creation, manipulation, validation and content extraction of PDF documents
Homepage:	http://pdfbox.apache.org/
License:	Apache License v2.0
Platforms:	Java
Function:	Metadata Extraction,Repair,File Format Migration,Validation,Encryption Detection
Content type:	Document

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

Apache PDFBox

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