CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#validationpdfa
Matchaos
Matchaos

Reputation: 21

How to make the difference between PDF and PDF/A C#

I developed a console based application which browses the same folder all midnights to converts PDF in PDF/A using ghostscript.

It actually works but now we get hundreds of files and I will need to check if each file is a PDF or a PDF/A to avoid launching the script in PDF/A files.

Is there any solution to make the difference between PDF and PDF/A ?

Thank you in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2183

Answers (4)

Matchaos
Matchaos

Reputation: 21

Sorry for the delay, I was sick.

I found the solution for my problem using Pac0's solution.

Instead of using XML, I used iTextSharp.xmp like that : 

public static bool CheckIfPdfa(PdfReader reader)
    {
        if (reader.Metadata != null && reader.Metadata.Length > 0)
        {
            IXmpMeta xmpMeta = XmpMetaParser.Parse(reader.Metadata, null);
            IXmpProperty pdfaidConformance = xmpMeta.GetProperty(XmpConst.NS_PDFA_ID, "pdfaid:conformance");
            IXmpProperty pdfaidPart = xmpMeta.GetProperty(XmpConst.NS_PDFA_ID, "pdfaid:part");
            reader.Close();

            if (pdfaidConformance == null || pdfaidPart == null)
            {
                return false;
            }
            else
            {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return false;
    }

Thank you all for your answers.

Upvotes: 0

Arnulfo Arroyo
Arnulfo Arroyo

Reputation: 208

You can check whether a document claims to be compliant by examining the XMP Metadata of the document.

Using the Datalogics PDFL Library C# Interface:

using (var docInput = new Document("input.pdf"))
{
    bool bIsPdfA1a =  docInput.XMPMetadata.Contains("pdfaid:conformance=\"A\"");
}

Disclaimer: I work for Datalogics

Upvotes: 0

Dheeraj Malik
Dheeraj Malik

Reputation: 1003

You can use Spire.PDF to detect the conformance level of a PDF document. Check out the following code:

PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument();
pdf.LoadFromFile("MS_Example.pdf");
PdfConformanceLevel conformance = pdf.Conformance;
Console.WriteLine(conformance.ToString());

Output:

enter image description here

Disclaimer：I'm an employee of Spire.

Upvotes: 0

Pac0
Pac0

Reputation: 23174

You can use a library like ITextSharp that will allow you to read PDF file.

To check if it is a PDF/A (well, actually to check if it claims to be a PDF/A, which should be sufficient for your needs) is a simple operation on reading PDF tags.

The code in this answer to another question should be what you need. It is VB.NET and it should be easy to translate to C# .

Basically :

  • open the PDF with the reader from ITextSharp (or probably any pdf reading library)
  • extract the XML metadata
  • check for a XML tag named pdfaid:conformance, and see if its value is A

Upvotes: 1

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