JHOVE / News: Recent posts

The current version of JHOVE is on Github (https://github.com/openpreserve/jhove), maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation. In addition, I've seen reports on practices by SourceForge that suggest that downloading from here simply is not safe.

JHOVE is moving to GitHub for future development work. I'm hoping this will encourage more contributors to sign up. There's already some work on Mavenizing it. The new repository is at
https://github.com/gmcgath/jhove

JHOVE 1.11 is now available at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/jhove/files/jhove/JHOVE%201.11/

Thanks to Maurice de Rooij for helping to debug the Windows batch files.

JHOVE 1.11b1 is available for downloading at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/jhove/files/jhove/JHOVE%201.11b1/

I've made some changes to the .bat files which are UNTESTED. Attempts to
get JHOVE to run on my feeble Windows XP laptop have failed. Please try
running at least JHOVE.BAT and let me know if it works.

If I don't hear of any problems, I'll release it in a couple of weeks as
1.11.

Here are the latest release notes:... read more

I've put up a new beta version of JHOVE, 1.10b1, at (https://sourceforge.net/projects/jhove/files/jhove/JHOVE%201.10b1/). The major change since last time is the handling of structure trees in PDF files; this should keep JHOVE from hanging or running out of memory on some PDF files as it used to. Please report any problems soon.

JHOVEView 1.9 is now available as a Mac OS X application. It's the same functionality as running JhoveView.jar, but it's prettier. It's available with the JHOVE 1.9 files.

JHOVE 1.9 is now available for downloading. I think this is the least buggy version of JHOVE ever. Take a look at the release notes; there are quite a few changes.

Lately I've been writing a user guide for JHOVE as part of an upcoming book. This means going through all the features to see how they really work, and this has turned up a number of bugs. Among the latest fixes are are: (1) If the AIFF module encounters a little-endian file, it treats all subsequent files as little-endian whether they are or not. (2) Certain errors in WAVE files throw an exception from the module instead of reporting that the file isn't well-formed. (3) The XML module's "s" and "schema" parameters conflicted, with "schema" being treated as both, and there was a problem with schema URIs with upper-case characters.... read more

I just discovered there's a mavenization of JHOVE on the Open Planets Foundation site. https://github.com/openplanets/jhove

I see I never added a news item for JHOVE 1.8. It's been there for a little while.

I've just added a JHOVE 1.9a1. This is mostly to fix some stupid little errors in 1.8, like putting ConfigWriter in the wrong jar file. Please test and report errors.

I've replaced JHOVE 1.8b1 with 1.8b2. It turns out the Ubuntu Java compiler won't build backwards-compatible versions, so 1.8b1 only worked with Java 7.

A beta version of JHOVE 1.8 is now available in the Files area. The major features are (1) a default configuration file will be created if none is found, and (2) a number of bugs in the PDF/A profile have been fixed. Please report any problems found with this.

There's now a build with some more changes, incorporating new code for finding the PDF trailer and making several fixes in PDF-A checking. The full build is a pain to do, so what I've done is uploaded a zip file that contains just the revised bin directory. This can be found at
http://jhove.sourceforge.net/jhove_1_8b1.zip

To use it, make a copy of JHOVE 1.7 (don't blow away your old one!) and replace the bin directory with the bin directory from the zip file. Please give feedback on any problems encountered; this is definitely not a stable release.

I've put a new test build of the GUI version of JHOVE at (http://jhove.sourceforge.net/JhoveView_4-Sep-2012.jar). This addresses one of the most persistent problems: the configuration file. If it can't find the expected configuration file, it creates a default version.

I've tested this on a Mac and an Ubuntu box, but not on WIndows, which is the toughest case because of its different and changing file system conventions. I'd greatly appreciate feedback on whether it works right on Windows, and which version you've tested with.

I've created a mailing list for JHOVE discussion. Specific bug reports and enhancement requests should still go to the tracker; this will be a place for more general discussions of problems and ideas for future development.

Choosing "Mailing Lists" from the SourceForge menu doesn't seem to work. If you want to subscribe, use this page:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jhove-discuss

I've updated the CVS root to match the 1.7 branch. The 1.7 branch is frozen and new work can happen in the root.

JHOVE 1.7 is finally available. Changes are minor, but this marks the transition from a Harvard-supported project (which it really hasn't been for a long time) to an officially independent SourceForge project. The JHOVE web pages are now at http://jhove.sourceforge.net . Version 1.7 is a branch in CVS, as versions should have been all along.

Figuring out where the config file goes is probably the #1 JHOVE support issue, since it's different for every OS and different releases of the same OS. I've just checked in a change to JhoveBase.java that will tell you where it was looking for the config file if it can't open it. You'll have to download and build from the source in CVS if you want this enhancement.

I've uploaded source files (XmlHandler.java and NisoImageMetadata.java) to correct invalid MIX 2.0 XML output in the value of grayResponseUnit. It was previously writing integers (as in 1.0) rather than the expected enumerated strings. It will be necessary to download the current source from the CVS repository and build the application to get this fix.

JHOVE 1.5 is now available for downloading, with support for TextMD metadata and a few bug fixes.

Please note that if you downloaded this before December 23, you may have a bad build. Please download it again. If you aren't sure, check the MD5 digest value of your download file against the corresponding MD5 file, or just re-download to be safe.

Thomas Ledoux's code for supporting TextMD has been committed to the repository. To get TextMD metadata in your output, you must specify the param "withtextmd=true" for each of the modules XmlModule, HtmlModule, AsciiModule, and Utf8Module in jhove.conf. The files Jhove.java and JhoveView.java have been bumped to version 1.5, though a downloadable 1.5 hasn't been created yet. There's a new schema (http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/xml/xsd/jhove/1.6/jhove.xsd) which is needed to validate XML output that includes TextMD.

JHOVE 1.4 is now available. The main change is better identification of PDF/A conformance.

Release 1.3 of JHOVE is now available. The major improvement is some fixes of serious bugs in the PDF module.

If you make heavy use of JHOVE (checking thousands of files or more), it would really help if you can change the location of the JHOVE schema you are accessing. See full details here:
http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/localizingschema.html

Within the past week I've received two complaints that jhove.conf is missing from 1.2. It was also missing from CVS, compounding the problem. I've added the standard jhove.conf and a variant which gives a more lenient treatment of TIFF to the conf directory in CVS. For the time being you'll have to download that separately, sorry.