Updates from the meeting-place of the PDF industry.
Articles and industry news |
EAA gets PDF/UA |
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EAA gets PDF/UA | ISO TC 42 publishes HDR standard | Google’s Gemini now creates PDFs, but … | PDF displacing printer drivers | “Pretty Darn Fascinating” – Tedium’s history of PDF | PDF forensics – lots to talk about! | Compute your PDFs wisely, or it will cost you! | From the “PDF in culture” desk | PDFacademicBot for May 2026 |
Cheers from London! |
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For those who attended PDF Week London 2026 last week, we hope that you had a great time – and thank you! For those who did not… check out what you missed! |
PDF/UA vs WCAG: Definitions and Key Differences |
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PDF/UA and WCAG are two essential accessibility standards that serve different purposes. Since each standard addresses a different layer of accessibility, using them together is key to delivering a fully inclusive digital experience. |
PDF is trending on GitHub |
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PDF Week London 2026 is almost here! | veraPDF 1.30 released | PDF is trending on GitHub | PDF/UA-1 gets its first errata correction | Will PDF become even more important? | Firefox v150 extends PDF editing capabilities | iPRES 2026 “digital pantry” seeks new ingredients | Mustang Project releases 2.23.0 “Bonne Journées de la Facture Électronique” | New JSON definitions for PDF extensions | Accessibility: it’s all about the authoring | PDFacademicBot for April 2026 |
New Best Practice Guide for Mathematical Content in PDF |
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Developed by the LaTeX Project LWG, this guide provides critical recommendations for authors and publishers to ensure complex mathematical and STEM content meets accessibility requirements and assistive technology users’ needs. |
20 years of the PDF Association: From competence center to driving force for the PDF industry |
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Twenty years ago, the Association for Digital Document Standards (ADDS) was launched. Today, the PDF Association has more than 160 members from around 30 countries. Over the past 20 years, the organization has achieved significant influence on the development and use of the Portable Document Format. |
Challenges in the forensic analysis of PDF files |
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Different PDF SDKs can produce inconsistent validation results due to hidden assumptions and simplified APIs, making careful API selection essential for accurate PDF security, forensics, and technical analysis. |
What developers really mean when they say they need PDFs |
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Developers rarely begin a project by asking for a PDF. They begin with something more specific. The PDF is simply where those requirements converge — the agreed-upon container for information that must be reliable, portable, and permanent. |
New FAQ: AI and PDF |
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This FAQ is designed to educate journalists, social media commentators and others lacking expertise in PDF technology on why and how AI systems use PDF documents. |
Register Extensions and Declarations with the PDF Association |
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The PDF Association supports interoperability by sharing extensions and declarations via GitHub, inviting members to contribute standardized, machine-readable data. |
Resources |
Best Practice Guide: Math in PDF |
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This Best Practice Guide provides recommendations for creating documents with complex technical and mathematical content using PDF files conforming to PDF 2.0. |
FAQ: AI and PDF |
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The PDF Association answers your questions about the intersection of artificial intelligence and PDF. |
Including Custom Metadata Structures in PDF |
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This Application Note describes means of incorporating custom metadata structures into PDF files, and includes guidance to assist organizations in selecting the most suitable mechanism(s) to meet their needs. |
FAQ on HDR in PDF: Focus on PDF/A and PDF/X |
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This Application Note provides acceptable uses of HDR images and color data when using PDF/A and PDF/X standards. |
Conforming to both PDF/A and PDF/UA |
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This document provides guidance and recommendations for application developers who want to create PDF files that conform to more than one ISO-standardized subset of PDF, specifically PDF/A (ISO 19005) and PDF/UA (ISO 14289). |
Third-Party Extensions and Attribution |
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This members-only technical resource lists various PDF extensions and other evidence associated with attribution. |
XMP Extension Schema Templates |
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Free XMP Extension Schema templates that support compliance with ISO standards and specifications utilizing XMP. |
EA-PDF v1.0 Specification |
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Based on PDF/A, the EA-PDF specification defines a specification for a vendor- and platform- neutral format for the long-term preservation of email. |
Tools for Accessible PDF |
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Commercial and free PDF creation, viewing or validation software that exposes the relationship between a PDF’s page content and its tags tree. |
Techniques for Accessible PDF |
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These Techniques provide atomic example files and test procedures in a vendor-neutral manner, allowing PDF files to be precisely tested while ensuring software developers retain maximum flexibility and potential for innovation. |
Case Studies & White Papers |
How TU Chemnitz Changes Structures, Not Just Formats |
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TU Chemnitz partnered with axes4 to embed PDF accessibility into university life, adopting axesWord as a key tool that enables staff and lecturers to create accessible PDFs directly in Microsoft Word. |
How California’s Court System Automated PDF Accessibility |
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From 4.8 million annual cases to 90% automated PDF/UA compliance: See why PDFix is the go-to solution for U.S. government agencies racing toward the 2026 accessibility mandate. |
OCR and PDF/A: The Foundation Your Enterprise AI Is Missing |
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Most enterprise AI initiatives are failing not because of the model — but because of the document. This whitepaper examines why flat, image-based PDFs render corporate archives invisible to RAG pipelines and LLMs, and makes the operational case for cloud-native OCR, PDF/A-2u standardisation, and zero-trust document architecture as the three non-negotiable preconditions for an AI-ready data lake. |
Use Case: Efficient Accessibility for Public Authorities in the State of Berlin |
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The State Office for Health and Social Affairs Berlin uses axesWord to create accessible documents directly in Microsoft Word and efficiently meet legal accessibility requirements. Broad adoption across departments reduces errors, speeds up document processes, and integrates accessibility into everyday workflows. |
How Jefferson County, Texas Is Solving PDF Accessibility at Scale |
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When a Texas county faced thousands of PDFs and an ADA compliance deadline, they didn’t hire more staff – they built a machine. Discover how Jefferson County used PDFix SDK to automate accessibility remediation at scale, processing up to 30,000 pages monthly without a single manual intervention. |
How the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Simplified Section 508 Compliance with PDFix |
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Discover how U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services transformed PDF accessibility workflow with PDFix Desktop Pro -simplifying Section 508 compliance and empowering every department to produce accessible, compliant PDFs with ease. |
Case Study: How the Federal Reserve Automates PDF Accessibility with PDFix |
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The Federal Reserve turned to PDFix SDK to streamline PDF accessibility across thousands of complex, scanned documents – ensuring compliance with Section 508, PDF/UA, and federal security standards while significantly reducing manual effort. |
Solimar Systems’ ReadyPDF Drives 100% PDF Optimization Success Rate at Major European Print Service Provider |
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Solimar Systems announces the successful implementation of ReadyPDF® Prepress Server at BC DirectGroup GmbH, Germany, with BC DirectGroup reporting a 100% success rate in PDF optimization for their high-volume production print and mail environment. |
Healthcare Company Saves More Than $4 Million Annually With Crawford Technologies’ Language Translation Solution |
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Crawford Technologies announces its AccessibilityNow® Translate which addresses a critical challenge faced by healthcare organizations that need to deliver vital, time-sensitive information to limited English proficiency (LEP) audiences efficiently and securely. |
Invisible Text: A PDF Superhero Power |
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Find out how Datalogics helped their customer to place information on a document that could either be copied and pasted or extracted as text – but that wouldn’t visually affect the appearance of the PDF itself. |
Member news |
Serie M/: New release 6.26 enables seamless AI integration |
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Next Level CCM: kwsoft® has released version 6.26 of its Serie M/ CCM solution. With this release, AI becomes an integral part of the CCM system. And there are other exciting new features. |
axaio launches MadeToTag Automate – PDF/UA Export. Automated. Scalable. |
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MadeToTag Automate – the solution for fully automating the export of accessible PDFs in environments working Adobe InDesign Server – ensuring legally compliant PDF/UA output in high-volume workflows. |
FormVu Now Lets Users Sign Converted Forms Right in the Browser |
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The FormVu 2026.05 release introduces a new useFormVuSigning flag that brings native signature support directly to converted HTML5 forms. Users can now type, draw, or upload signatures within the browser, which are then automatically embedded as appearance images when saved back to PDF. |
HANCOM open-sources AI auto-tagging in OpenDataLoader PDF |
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HANCOM has open-sourced an AI auto-tagging feature in OpenDataLoader PDF that automatically writes accessibility tags directly into existing PDF documents, running on-premise with no per-page or per-document limits. |
JLB Informatique becomes Calico France, joins new European IIM group |
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JLB Informatique becomes Calico France and joins Calico IIM, a European Intelligent Information Management group alongside GedZilla, FileStream, and LM-Kit. |
From broken PDF to Perfect Postal Piece in record time |
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callas software announced DocuPost as a new OEM Partner. |
Coherent PDF Command Line Tools version 2.9 released |
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Coherent PDF Command Line Tools (Cpdf) version 2.9 brings new functions to detect and remove JavaScript, create PDF portfolios, reprocess JPEG2000 images, and process metadata streams. Extensions to existing functions include extracting attachment data in JSON format, processing lossless CMYK images for compression, and extracting soft masks, optionally combining them with their extracted images. |
AI-based PDF Auto-tagging |
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Auto-tagging plays a critical role in making PDFs accessible. Without tags, a PDF is just visually positioned text. Assistive technologies cannot reliably interpret layout, hierarchy, or relationships between elements. |
Only 9.5% Accessible: What a New Study on PDF Accessibility in the Public Sector Reveals |
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Public authorities in Germany are failing on PDF accessibility. A new study finds that only 9.5% of documents on public sector websites can actually be used by people with disabilities, with the majority containing errors or being structurally inaccessible from the start. |
Continual Engine Helps Publishers Scale Accessibility Ahead of ADA Title II |
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Continual Engine shares perspectives on how publishers are transitioning from fragmented remediation efforts to scalable accessibility infrastructure ahead of evolving ADA Title II expectations. The release explores workflow-level accessibility strategies, automation, and long-term management of complex PDF ecosystems. |
Summarize PDFs with AI: introducing our new AI Summarizer |
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iLovePDF‘s new AI Summarizer turns long PDFs into short, structured summaries in seconds, with adjustable length and processing depth for everything from quick briefs to detailed technical reports. |
PoDoFo 1.1 released and relicensed to LGPL2+ or MPL 2.0 |
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A release that opens up even more to the business world, with improvements in support for validation, digital signatures and more robust handling of imperfect PDFs. |
New KDAN PDF for Mac: Precise in Details, Instant in Actions |
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KDAN PDF launches its re-engineered Mac version featuring a new performance-driven engine that delivers 2X faster speeds and seamless continuity for professional workflows. Leveraging 15 years of expertise and a 100-million user base, this update sets a new standard for high-intensity document management. |
callas software releases pdfToolbox 17 |
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callas software today announced the release of pdfToolbox 17, the newest version of its flagship product line |
iText Suite 9.6: Easier WTPDF, Color Contrast Checks, and Smarter OCR! |
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This iText by Apryse release greatly improves PDF accessibility and reuse. PDF/UA creation now includes automatic color contrast checks and enhanced APIs for accessible, reusable Well-Tagged PDFs. Also, pdfOCR 5.0.0 adds PaddleOCR and EasyOCR support with broad language coverage, better performance, and optional GPU acceleration. |
Events |
PDF Week Incheon 2026 |
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The PDF Association invites members and ISO TC 171 delegates to PDF Week Incheon 2026! |
PDF Week Online 2027 |
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PDF Week Online 2027 is a virtual meeting (audio / screen-share only) for PDF Association members and ISO delegates. |
PDF Week Spring 2027 |
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The PDF Association invites members and ISO TC 171 delegates to PDF Week Spring 2027! |