Hi Maruan

> As of today PDFBox has no formal support for specific PDF versions in a way 
> that a specific version can be enforced, validated ...

Perhaps that is because there is not much demand for this? Nowadays everyone 
has instant access to the latest version of Adobe Reader so checking that a PDF 
can be opened with a specific version of Adobe Reader is not that useful 
anymore. There might be some niche cases, but I can’t think what they would be. 
For cases where it’s important that a PDF file is valid then a format such as 
PDF/A or PDF/X must be used instead as “vanilla" PDF is ambiguous.

> The PDFBox PDF/A validation does a good job for PDF/A 1b but it can not be 
> easily extended to other standards.

Yes, PDF/A is carefully validated because it is for archival purposes, unlike 
regular PDF files.

> Do you think that there is a need for a more formal support of such standards 
> and versions? The would influence some of the design decisions for the parser 
> and affect the base objects.


I can’t think of a reason why someone would want to parse a specific PDF 
version, so my answer is no, I don’t think there is such a need. Has the syntax 
of PDF even changed that much over the different versions?

— John

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