Introduction

pdfHarmony is a key resource for performing process quality control in mission-critical applications. The software analyzes PDF files, identifies and repairs corrupt/malformed PDF files

Leveraging Adobe Systems’s own PDF Library, pdfHarmony offers positive identification in high-volume settings of any PDF page that stops Adobe Reader®, as well as recovery and repair of many otherwise broken PDF files.

Adobe Acrobat can open the vast majority of PDFs, and so can pdfHarmony. For these files, pdfHarmony optimizes the file structure, reduces the file size without affecting page content, and returns an authentic Adobe PDF file, fully compliant with ISO 32000, the international standard for PDF.

Technical Introduction

pdfHarmony leverages Adobe’s PDF library to run a series of processes that convert PDFs to Adobe PDF. These processes include:

  • detecting and reporting damaged or malformed PDFs that can’t be opened with Adobe Acrobat or Reader
  • detecting and reporting page rendering errors
  • repairing and saving PDFs
  • consolidates identical fonts, font subsets, and XObjects to reduce file size without altering objects on the page
  • converting input PDFs into authentic Adobe PDFs
  • ensuring PDFs are ISO 32000 compliant

pdfHarmony operates on recursive folders, watched folders, or from the command line. It sets document information fields and generates XMP metadata with or without modifying the creation date. In addition, pdfHarmony sets PDF open options that control page and layout modes, including open actions, toolbar, menu and bookmark states.

Results are captured in a log file and may be summarized in an HTML report.

User Guide Conventions

This User Guide uses certain styles of text to indicate different things throughout the documentation. The following is a description of these styles:

  • Command Line user input:
pdfHarmony -p -optimize -o c:\Appligent\pdfHarmony\output.pdf c:\Appligent\pdfHarmony\input.pdf
  • Code snippets: begin_message

Note: Paragraphs that start with “Note:” are special notes relating to the subject. It is recommended that you read all notes.

In this Guide