Compatibility between pdfToolbox and Acrobat

There is no 100% compatibility between Preflight and pdfToolbox as the underlying engines are different in some areas. Please find the differences overview below:

Fixups existing only in Preflight (Acrobat)

All Preflight Fixups that are based on Acrobat's PDF Optimizer are listed below:

  • Repair damaged document
  • Discard all comments and form fields
  • Discard all external cross references
  • Discard all form submission, import and reset actions
  • Discard all JavaScript actions
  • Discard document structure
  • Discard embedded thumbnails
  • Discard all alternate images
  • Detect and merge image fragments
  • Remove unreferenced named destinations
  • Remove invalid links
  • Normalize spot color appearance
  • Stamp page

Features existing only in pdfToolbox

pdfToolbox is updated more frequently and therefore more Fixups are available. Some Fixups also have more settings as in the Preflight version, such as "Convert colors", "Flatten transparency" etc. Below is the list of all such Fixups (linked to their respective documentation articles):

Fallbacks during execution

Internally, "Embed fonts" in Acrobat is automatically assigned to  pdfToolbox's "Embed missing fonts". The same happens with Preflight's "Convert to spot color" which will be assigned automatically to pdfToolbox's "Map colors".