3 posts tagged with "compliance"

PDF/A and canonical PDF sound like they should solve the same problem. Both are about making PDFs more reliable. Both matter to compliance teams. Both show up when engineers start asking whether a document will still mean the same thing later.

But they are not the same thing.

PDF/A answers: Will this document remain renderable and self-contained for long-term preservation?

Canonical PDF answers: Will this input produce stable bytes, a stable hash, and a record of what changed?

Adobe is the name most people associate with PDF. Adobe PDF Services is a broad API suite for creating, converting, extracting, combining, and manipulating documents.

PDFCanon is narrower by design. It does not try to be a general PDF toolkit. It solves one infrastructure problem: turn untrusted PDFs into byte-stable, auditable canonical documents.

I spent a long time figuring out why sha256sum invoice.pdf returns a different hash every time my accounting software re-exports "the same" document.

Turns out this is a fundamental property of the PDF format - and it quietly breaks a number of real-world systems that depend on stable file hashes: deduplication, audit trails, content-addressed storage, integrity verification.