disgaceful fail when specifying X-4

[Reissner]

Given the following test.tex,

\DocumentMetadata{pdfstandard={x-4},xmp= {   false},xmp=true,pdfstandard={x-4},pdfversion=1.7}
\documentclass{article}%[a4paper,draft]

\begin{document}
test
\end{document}

verification yields

Jun 05, 2026 11:55:41 PM org.verapdf.gf.model.impl.pd.GFPDMetadata getXMPPackage
WARNING: Problems with parsing metadata. XML parsing failure
org.verapdf.xmp.XMPException: XML parsing failure
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser.parseInputSource(XMPMetaParser.java:306)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser.parseXmlFromBytebuffer(XMPMetaParser.java:239)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser.parseXmlFromInputStream(XMPMetaParser.java:189)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser.parseXml(XMPMetaParser.java:154)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser.parse(XMPMetaParser.java:97)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.XMPMetaFactory.parse(XMPMetaFactory.java:120)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.VeraPDFMeta.parse(VeraPDFMeta.java:125)
        at org.verapdf.gf.model.impl.pd.GFPDMetadata.getXMPPackage(GFPDMetadata.java:109)
        at org.verapdf.gf.model.impl.pd.GFPDMetadata.getLinkedObjects(GFPDMetadata.java:96)
        at org.verapdf.pdfa.validation.validators.BaseValidator.addAllLinkedObjects(BaseValidator.java:285)
        at org.verapdf.pdfa.validation.validators.BaseValidator.checkNext(BaseValidator.java:250)
        at org.verapdf.pdfa.validation.validators.BaseValidator.validate(BaseValidator.java:185)
        at org.verapdf.pdfa.validation.validators.BaseValidator.validateAll(BaseValidator.java:149)
        at org.verapdf.processor.ProcessorImpl.validate(ProcessorImpl.java:241)
        at org.verapdf.processor.ProcessorImpl.process(ProcessorImpl.java:119)
        at org.verapdf.processor.BatchFileProcessor.processItem(BatchFileProcessor.java:167)
        at org.verapdf.processor.BatchFileProcessor.processList(BatchFileProcessor.java:85)
        at org.verapdf.processor.AbstractBatchProcessor.process(AbstractBatchProcessor.java:104)
        at org.verapdf.cli.VeraPdfCliProcessor.processFilePaths(VeraPdfCliProcessor.java:143)
        at org.verapdf.cli.VeraPdfCliProcessor.processPaths(VeraPdfCliProcessor.java:104)
        at org.verapdf.cli.VeraPdfCli.singleThreadProcess(VeraPdfCli.java:143)
        at org.verapdf.cli.VeraPdfCli.main(VeraPdfCli.java:112)
        at org.verapdf.apps.GreenfieldCliWrapper.main(GreenfieldCliWrapper.java:54)
Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 26; columnNumber: 51; Attribute "xmlns:pdfxid" was already specified for element "rdf:Description".
        at java.xml/com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(DOMParser.java:262)
        at java.xml/com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:342)
        at org.verapdf.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser.parseInputSource(XMPMetaParser.java:302)
        ... 22 more

[bdoubrov]

@Reissner the issue is caused by these lines in the XMP metadata:

<rdf:Description rdf:about=""
    ... (19 lines skipped)
    xmlns:pdfxid="http://www.npes.org/pdfx/ns/id/"
    xmlns:pdfxid="http://www.npes.org/pdfx/ns/id/">

This duplication of the namespace definitions is treated as a syntax error by the XMP parser, or more precisely by the SAX Parser according to the XML 1.0 spec:

Well-formedness constraint: Unique Att Spec
An attribute name MUST NOT appear more than once in the same start-tag or empty-element tag.

veraPDF treats this XMP package as malformed and continues the validation logging a warning and generating the correct validation report.

So, I wonder, where exactly do you see the issue? Is it the SAX Parser exception stack in the log that causes the confusion?

PS. I used this PDF document generated by TeXLive from your LaTeX source to reproduce the issue.

[Reissner]

Hm, i am not sure what you wanted to tell me... could you reproduce?
I used texlive 2026.
Maybe it is not a bug in verapdf but in the latex compiler..
I used lualatex by the way.

What i also wonder: return value is 1. this may be correct indicating that the pdf is not valid.
In fact a-1b is checked.
But if an exception occurs I would expect that validation fails so no result: undecided.

[bdoubrov]

This exception does occur in parsing of XMP metadata and is handled gracefully. veraPDF continues validation and generates the correct report. And yes, exit code 1 means that the PDF does not conform to the validation profile.

So, in short, the problem is on the creation step of PDF. I'd suggest you raise this issue within LaTeX community.

And we'll hide exception logs to avoid this confusion in the future.