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veraPDF

Industry-backed open source accessibility validator for PDF/A and PDF/UA conformance.

Jobs Accessibility Edit

Since 2015

Operated by veraPDF Consortium

Visit veraPDF

Opens the vendor's own site.

Jobs covered

Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.

Accessibility Browse all accessibility tools

validates and reports, does not repair

Edit Browse all edit tools

narrow metadata repair only

Where your files are processed

No server involved

A Java application installed locally, also available as a container image. No hosted validation service is involved, which is what makes it usable on restricted preservation networks. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.

A locally installed Java application/library, also available as an installer/container. It parses and validates files on the machine; no hosted validation service is required, which is what makes it usable on restricted preservation networks.

What it does

veraPDF checks PDF files against every part and conformance level of PDF/A and the PDF/UA machine checks, and can enforce institutional policy profiles. Alongside the pass/fail verdict it extracts document features such as fonts, images and metadata, produces machine-readable reports in several formats, and offers a metadata fixer that repairs broken metadata or removes an unjustified PDF/A flag.

It ships as a Java library, a desktop interface, a command line for batch work and a container image. Current release is 1.30.3 (9 October 2026), requiring Java 8, 11, 17 or 21; it is dual-licensed GPL-3.0-or-later or MPL-2.0 and free/open source.

It is a validator/inspector, not a general PDF viewer, renderer, converter or editor; apart from narrow metadata repair it does not alter documents.

Best for

Archives, libraries and publishers who must prove long-term preservation conformance in an automated ingestion pipeline.

Worth knowing

It is a validator, not an editor: apart from narrow metadata repairs it does not alter document content, and it has no redaction, page or assembly operations. It also cannot convert anything - it reports rather than transcodes.

The GUI presents validation results/reports, not a general-purpose PDF reading experience; do not treat veraPDF as a viewer or renderer. It does not check semantic accessibility or certify legal compliance; PDF/UA machine checks cover the machine-verifiable subset, not the whole standard.

Java 8, 11, 17 or 21 must be installed. The project's GitHub licence metadata reports GPL-3.0 only, but the project site/README clearly offer GPL-3.0-or-later OR MPL-2.0.

No hosted service, account, price or data-residency guarantee applies; validation runs locally.

Details, and where each comes from

Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.

Versions covered
Windows · macOS · Linux · Self-hosted
Website
verapdf.org
Requires an account
Not applicable
Watermark on the free tier
Not verified
Maximum file size
Not verified
Batch processing
Yes
Data residency
Self-hosted
Open source
Yes
Self-hostable
Yes
Licence
Dual-licensed GPL-3.0-or-later or MPL-2.0, per the project site and veraPDF-library README

Dual-licensed GPL-3.0-or-later or MPL-2.0, per the project site and veraPDF-library README; GitHub's licence API reports GPL-3.0 only and understates the choice. The tool is free/open source; no hosted service or account is required.

Java 8, 11, 17 or 21 is required; the installer runs on Windows/macOS/Linux.

Redaction
No redaction feature
Programmatic access
Embeddable library · Command line
Last availability check
Responded in 704 ms 21 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.

What the redaction verdict rests on

From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.

What that does not establish

The repository README is the source, because verapdf.org renders almost nothing without scripting. veraPDF validates files against PDF/A and PDF/UA profiles; validation is read-only and the project describes no content-modification features. The vendor’s own published material was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout.

Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist - it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach - but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote. Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.

https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library

What the vendor says

Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.

  • “veraPDF is dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPLv3+) and Mozilla Public License v2 or later (MPLv2+).”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 16 October 2026

    Confirmed verbatim: the "Open Licensing" box reads "veraPDF is dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPLv3+) and Mozilla Public License v2 or later (MPLv2+)." The wording note belongs in the record: the claim's recorded source was "verapdf.org home", and the site root does not carry the sentence while /home/ does, so the source as written was ambiguous rather than wrong. This is the second time in this campaign that a licensing claim has turned on which page of a site is meant, and it is why the method names both URLs and says which one carries the text.

    Recorded as the project's description; the licence files themselves were not read for this entry.

    Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://verapdf.org/home/
    From
    the raw HTTP response
    SHA-256
    3d12be701b49717d4d2a0b74ee5906c7602e799c1e6f0475ff2c34e9151e95c5

    How we checked

    Two URLs were read on 2026-09-21. The site root https://verapdf.org/ is a splash page of two sentences and two buttons with no licence text at all - searched for "GPL" and "MPL" and found neither in the 6900-byte response.

    The licence statement is on https://verapdf.org/home/, reached by the splash page's own "Explore" button, read as raw HTML (23297 bytes) where it appears under a heading reading "Open Licensing". sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that /home/ response.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “The veraPDF PDF/A Validation Library is dual-licensed, see:”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 16 October 2026

    Confirmed verbatim, and the claim is a truncated sentence: the README reads "The veraPDF PDF/A Validation Library is dual-licensed, see:" and then lists the two licences, which the claim cuts off at the colon. The rendering carries both licence files as links, named LICENSE.MPL and appearing alongside an "MPL-2.0 license" label, so the repository substantiates the dual licensing that the sentence points at.

    This entry and the veraPDF home page entry verified in the same batch are the same fact sourced twice, which is the honest position for a licence claim: both are the project's own assertion, and neither is a licence file read end to end.

    Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    e5e601341da10f4caa3b13806785e79c50e9eba26ed3a08f0db1bc8ae236cb0d

    How we checked

    Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-github-com-veraPDF-veraPDF-library-a0b3c820.txt.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.

Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.

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Related reading

How this record was put together

Editorial review.
No editor has signed this record off. That is not the same as nothing having been checked, and the lines below say what has.
Source reading.
2 claims taken from the vendor's own pages, read between 16 October 2026 and 16 October 2026.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 21 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We ran this ourselves. The file handling was watched directly.

Sources: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/tag/v1.30.3 (v1.30.3, 9 October 2026; read 2026-10-16); https://verapdf.org/ (validates all PDF/A and PDF/UA parts/conformance levels; GPLv3+/MPLv2+; read 2026-10-16); https://docs.verapdf.org/ (Java 8+, GUI, CLI, library, policy, validation, reports; read 2026-10-16); https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library README (Java 8, 11, 17 or 21, dual licence GPLv3+/MPLv2+; read 2026-10-16).

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