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ZUGFeRD is a German standard dedicated to simplifying the processing of electronic invoices and to improving accounting efficiency. This standard deals with hybrid data about e-invoices combined into a single PDF that fully conforms to the PDF/A-3 standard (ISO 19005-3). Each ZUGFeRD-compliant PDF carries e-invoices in two formats:
  • PDF format to visualize the e-invoice contents;
  • XML format to extract and parse the relevant data from e-invoice by a machine.
ZUGFeRD-compliant PDF may also include spreadsheets, images, and other data related to a target e-invoice. To create ZUGFeRD-compliant PDF with ABBYY FineReader Engine:
  1. Create a FRDocument object with the CreateFRDocument method.
  2. Add one or several pages of the target invoice to the created FRDocument using the AddImageFile method of the FRDocument object.
  3. Call the Process method of the FRDocument object.
To learn more on how to process the documents with ABBYY FineReader Engine, see Tuning Parameters of Preprocessing, Analysis, Recognition, and Synthesis.
  1. Add the XML version of the invoice as an attachment to the created FRDocument using the PDFAttachment object.
  2. Create a PDFExportParams object with the CreatePDFExportParams method of the Engine object.
  3. Set the ZUGFeRD-specific parameters:
See more useful information about fine-tuning the document export in Tuning Export Parameters.
  1. Save the ZUGFeRD-compliant PDF with the Export method of the FRDocument object.
To check the validity of the output, you may use the ZUGFeRD validation portal.

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See also

Tuning Parameters of Page Preprocessing, Analysis, Recognition, and Synthesis Tuning Export Parameters