Tuesday, January 6, 2026
1 change · 17.0
Enhancements to existing features
This update ensures our PDFs meet the stricter PDF/A-3A standard, a key requirement for accurate document archiving. Previously, issues with different PDF libraries caused validation failures. This change includes fixes to metadata, PDF structure, and character encoding to guarantee compliance and avoid potential data loss during archiving.
Original PR description
This commit upgrades our PDF/A compliance from 3B to 3A, and fixes a few issues previously undetected due to the different PyPDF libraries we're currently supporting that made the previous PDF fails…
This commit upgrades our PDF/A compliance from 3B to 3A, and fixes a few issues previously undetected due to the different PyPDF libraries we're currently supporting that made the previous PDF fails even the 3B validation. Improvement 1: PDFA validators were previously detecting our file as 3B. Hence we update the metadata content `conformance` to `A`. Issue 2: When using `._pypdf` library, we failed the 6.1.2-2 and 6.8-1 rule even though we have implemented them on the previous version. It seems that this is caused by the `if SUBMOD...` check only ensuring it's not equal to `_pypdf2_2` (which makes it trigger for the new `_pypdf`). Hence, we reclarify the comments and fix the IF check. Issue 3: After implementing issue 2, it seems that a traceback occurs every time we're using `._pypdf` and calling the pdf write method. This is because the added characters on the header can't be decoded with `UTF-8`. Hence we change it to other greater-than-127-bytes characters that can still be decoded with `UTF-8`. (The actual character used here doesn't matter). Improvement 4: To be compliant with the new 3A rules (additional rules not there in 3B when we first implemented them), we add a minimal mark info dictionary and document structure on the PDF catalog object (`_root_object`). task-None