What developers really mean when they say they need PDFs

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

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

The PDF Association supports interoperability by sharing extensions and declarations via GitHub, inviting members to contribute standardized, machine-readable data.

The Members-Only PDF Marketplace Survey report for 2025 is now available!

Gain insights into the PDF marketplace via this exclusive report.

German government standardizes on PDF/UA

German government standardizes on PDF/UA | ISO/IEC committee starts work on a vocabulary for authenticity | Chrome adds ink (not “annotations”) to PDF pages | The challenge(s) PDF poses for AI | LaTeX leader and advocate of math in Tagged PDF honored | PDF Differences: “PDF versions” test files now public | ICC publishes information on small footprint color profiles | GWG publishes “how to” for print-ready PDFs from Canva | Typst supports PDF 2.0 and PDF/A-4 | It’s bonkers! | PDFacademicBot for March 2026

New Topics pages speed access to relevant content

The PDF Association has launched a new “Topics” menu on pdfa.org to enhance navigation and access to authoritative, structured information on PDF technologies and standards.

How ADA Title II Will Affect PDFs and Digital Documents

Ensure ADA Title II compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA. Learn how accessible PDFs, proper tagging, OCR, and structured documents reduce legal risk for public entities.

Using TDMRep to license AI mining of PDFs

How do you license (or not!) AIs to mine your PDFs? In this article we clarify the use of TDMRep’s reservation of rights in XMP metadata for PDF and PDF/A.

Why PDF/A’s conformance level “b” fails machine reading

A document claiming conformance to PDF/A’s conformance level “b” can be visually perfect and machine-unreadable at the same time. This is not a bug — it is what the standard was designed to do. Understanding the difference between rendering a glyph and encoding a character is the first step to building archives that AI can actually use.

Accessible math in PDF – finally!

Math in PDF files is finally fully accessible, and can be navigated and read by capable assistive technology. This development, aligning creation software, modern PDF standards, compatible viewers and assistive technology, finally closes the accessibility gap between the web and downloadable STEM documents.

How TU Chemnitz Changes Structures, Not Just Formats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.