Bad trailer not reported

[thomashicks]

Dev Effort

1D

Description

I had a file which displayed fine in Adobe Acrobat Reader 11.0.23 but when you exit it would ask if you wanted to save changes to the file. While not very intuitive this is apparently an indication that the reader found something about the file it did not like and wanted to fix the issue. If you save the file then it does fix the issue but it changes so many things that it is hard to tell what it did not like in the first place.

Running the file through the current veraPDF 1.12.1 did find some issues but they were unrelated to the problem that Acrobat Reader was alerting on. After some debugging it became clear that the problem was in the fixed format trailer. In text files that terminate with a single <0ah> character (unix format) there should be a space to fill in the place where a <0dh> might normally reside in a DOS format text file. This is so the total character count of each trailer line is 20. This is not visually apparent in most text editors. I have attached two files: one with a good trailer and one with a bad trailer.

Perhaps this could be added to the list of things that are checked by veraPDF.

Thanks!

Tom

pdftestgood.pdf
pdftestbad.pdf

[carlwilson]

@bdoubrov could you provide an update here please.