Applies to: All editions
Verification uses the applied policy
When a PDF is sanitized, PDFSanitize stores a snapshot of the exact Sanitization Options used to create that output. Verification checks against that stored policy rather than whatever settings happen to be selected in the interface later.
This prevents a later profile change from silently changing the meaning of an existing verification result.
Structural integrity check
Verification first reopens the sanitized output and validates its PDF structure. If structural validation fails, the verification result is Failed and policy-specific checks do not continue.
Page count
For a structurally valid output, PDFSanitize compares the source and sanitized page counts. A mismatch fails the page-count check.
Policy-specific checks
Depending on the options applied, verification can check that the output no longer contains:
- Document information metadata;
- XMP metadata;
- Document identifiers;
- Previous revisions;
- Selected annotations;
- Interactive forms;
- Embedded files;
- Active scripts;
- Document actions;
- Optional/layered content;
- Hyperlink annotations and external navigation actions;
- Bookmarks;
- Detected hidden/off-page text.
The annotation check allows link or widget annotations to remain when the active policy intentionally keeps hyperlinks or forms.
SHA-256 fingerprints
The verification record includes SHA-256 values for the source and sanitized files. If a sanitization result does not already contain those fingerprints, verification calculates the values when it runs.
Manual verification
If automatic verification was disabled, select the sanitized document and use Verify Output. A manual verification requires an existing sanitization result for that document in the current session.