Factur-X Viewer

What Factur-X is

A Factur-X invoice is one file that two different readers can both use. To a person it is an ordinary PDF — the invoice as it would be printed. To software it carries a complete UN/CEFACT Cross Industry Invoice as an embedded XML attachment, normally named factur-x.xml. Neither half is a summary of the other; they are the same invoice expressed twice, and the specification requires them to agree.

The container is a PDF/A-3 file, an archival PDF profile that permits arbitrary attachments and records the relationship between the document and the files inside it. Germany publishes the same specification as ZUGFeRD; the two are technically aligned, and files produced under either name open here.

What this viewer does

It opens the container and reports what it finds:

• The PDF itself — page count, version, size, whether XMP metadata is present, and whether the document declares interactive features such as JavaScript, forms or signatures. Declared, not executed.
• The embedded files — every attachment, with its name, description, size and detected type. Listed only; nothing is opened or offered for download.
• The invoice — the embedded XML, read through the same pipeline as the CII viewer: the same security screen, the same parser, the same structured model.
• The declared profile — MINIMUM, BASIC WL, BASIC, EN 16931 or EXTENDED, read from the PDF metadata and from the invoice’s own guideline identifier.

What it does not do

This is a viewer, not a validator, and the difference matters more here than usual because a hybrid file has so many ways of being subtly wrong. Three things are never checked, and the result page says so every time rather than leaving you to infer it:

• PDF/A-3 conformance is not checked. If the metadata claims PDF/A-3B, that claim is shown as a claim. Establishing it requires a conformance checker such as veraPDF against several hundred structural requirements.
• Factur-X profile rules are not run. A document declaring EN 16931 is not checked against what EN 16931 requires.
• French business rules are not run. Nothing on this page is a statement about compliance with the French e-invoicing reform.

For rule validation, use the France e-invoice validator, which runs the official French rule packages against a Factur-X PDF, or the UBL validator for the EN 16931 rules against UBL 2.1 documents.

Detection is evidence, not a filename

The obvious way to find the invoice is to look for an attachment called factur-x.xml. That test is wrong in both directions, so it is not the test used here. An attachment is accepted as the embedded invoice because its root element is a CrossIndustryInvoice in the UN/CEFACT namespace — nothing else qualifies it.

The filename, the name declared in the XMP metadata and the presence of the Factur-X schema then decide how confident the result is, and every signal used is listed under technical details. A file called factur-x.xml containing something else is reported as exactly that.

Your PDF never leaves your device

The file is read in this browser tab and parsed by PDF.js in a worker served from this site. This tool has no upload step to send it through, no database to store it in, and no analytics event that carries anything about it — the filename included. Opening a document produces no network request derived from its contents: not for a remote image, not for a font, not for a link the document contains.

Because a PDF is an executable-ish format handled by a large parser, the viewer is built so that you do not have to trust the document. Document JavaScript cannot run, because the scripting engine PDF.js would need is not part of what this site deploys. Pages render to a canvas with annotations, links and forms disabled, so no markup derived from the PDF is ever inserted into this page. Embedded files are enumerated but never opened.

The profiles

Factur-X defines five profiles, each a larger subset of the semantic model. The profile a document declares tells you what it is meant to contain, and it appears in two places — the XMP ConformanceLevel field and the invoice’s guideline identifier.

• MINIMUM — header data only; not a complete invoice under EN 16931.
• BASIC WL — as MINIMUM, plus VAT breakdown, but without line items.
• BASIC — line items, sufficient for simple invoices.
• EN 16931 — the full European semantic model. Often called COMFORT.
• EXTENDED — EN 16931 plus additional business data.

When the two declarations disagree, both are shown and neither is chosen. See Factur-X for the format in more depth, and EN 16931 for the semantic model underneath it.