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

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

Mailing List(s)

See here for more information.

Release Feed

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Issues Feed

2026-06-13 14:18:37: [PDFBOX-6211] Add test for PDFBOX-6172; <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
2026-06-15 12:30:23: [PDFBOX-6210] Incorrect CJK Character Extraction for Shared Glyphs; <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
2026-06-10 13:54:28: [PDFBOX-6209] Regression in v3.0.7 causes Splitter to extract pages with text converted to symbols; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Edward Ashley
2026-05-29 11:25:20: [PDFBOX-6208] Create support files for AI tooling; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Maruan Sahyoun
2026-06-02 13:51:33: [PDFBOX-6207] Setting checkbox value fails when field has an invalid /Opt entry; <style type="text/css"> .tableBorder, .grid { background-color: #fff; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; } .tableBorder td, .grid td { vertical-align: top; padding:...; by Maruan Sahyoun

Apache PDFBox

Contents