Roman Toda named PDF Champion 2026

The PDF Association is delighted to recognize Roman Toda as PDF Champion 2026. We do this to celebrate his longstanding contributions to PDF technology, his commitment to open standards, and his leadership in advancing the world's most widely used digital document format.

Roman is Chief Standardization Officer at Foxit, where he supports standards development, compliance, and the evolution of PDF technology. Roman brings decades of hands-on software development experience to the industry, spanning PDF rendering, encryption, digital signatures, forms, annotations, OCR, and content extraction.

As a member of the PDF Association's Board of Directors, Roman contributes to the organization's strategic direction. He also chairs the Deriving HTML from PDF Technical Working Group, whose work helps unlock the potential of tagged PDF for content reuse, interoperability, and accessibility. He’s currently leading development of a new educational resource for Tagged PDF, which will launch later this year.

A familiar speaker at PDF Days and other industry events, Roman generously shares his expertise on subjects ranging from PDF 2.0 encryption and digital signatures to accessible, reusable document content.

Roman exemplifies the spirit of the PDF Champion award: technical excellence, collaborative leadership, and a sustained commitment to improving PDF for everyone.

We congratulate him on this recognition, and thank him for his exceptional service to the global PDF community.

We hope he packs his award (a kilogram of engraved aluminum) safely for the flight home!