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Screenshot from Doom played in a PDF file.

Doom in a PDF

Doom in a PDF | PDF Week Boston 2025 | The EAA is coming! | AI and accessibility standards | Patch for veraPDF | OPF Annual Report highlights the importance of PDF/A | ISO TC 46 YouTube Channel | PDFacademicBot for January, 2025
About the author: The PDF Association staff delivers a vendor-neutral platform for PDF’s stakeholders, facilitating the development of open specifications and ISO standards for PDF technology. The staff are located in Germany, the … Read more
PDF Association staff


January 22, 2025

PDF in the Wild



Thanks to PDF’s allowances for JavaScript and resulting support in some PDF viewers, the (patently ridiculous, right?!?) idea of playing Doom – the legendary (if low-res) video game – in a PDF file, just EXPLODED recently. A very few examples…

Why? Why not! Try it! (requires a Chromium-based browser). It’s open source, of course.

And… yes, you guessed it… Doom isn’t the only video game you can play in a PDF:

Speakers at past PDF Days events (there's another coming up this September in Berlin) have discussed what is (or might be) possible with games inside PDF - see Michael Demey’s “Forget the PS5, I’ve got a PDF 2.0” (YouTube) and Patrick Gallot’s RichMedia Doom challenge.

PDF Week Boston 2025

PDF Week Boston 2025A document summarizing some of the practical details for the upcoming PDF Week Boston 2025 for the week April 28 to May 2 2025 is now published.

Be sure to check out information on ground transportation, hotels, visa requirements and what’s special about Concord, Massachusetts! Members can sponsor this event - please get in touch to learn more!

The EAA is coming. What are you doing about it?

The EAA (European Accessibility Act) comes into effect this year. One way in which the publishing industry (to take but one example) is responding is via the ONIX metadata platform, as EDItEUR’s Chris Saynor discusses in this video

The PDF Association is working on a specification for the inclusion of ONIX metadata in a PDF context. Stay tuned…

A warning on excessive claims about AI and accessibility

A recent US Federal Trade Commission action against a vendor offering accessibility software for web sites offers a warning to those who would consider AI as an easy-button for making PDFs accessible!

HDR Experts Day in Japan

The International Color Consortium (ICC) has announced a dedicated ICC HDR Stills Experts Day on March 3, 2025 at Chiba University, Japan to discuss supporting ISO HDR stills in ICC color managed workflows.

Sessions will share the latest developments from ISO, ICC, W3C, and PDF HDR working groups with the primary goal to begin the process of defining open specifications and standards for supporting ISO HDR stills in ICC color managed workflows in a vendor-neutral manner.

Vulnerability patch for veraPDF 1.26

The Open Preservation Foundation’s latest update to veraPDF 1.26 includes a single important fix to address a potential vulnerability (CVE-2024-52800) when running custom Schematron profiles (XSLT transformations) via the CLI. veraPDF is an open-source, industry-supported PDF/A and PDF/UA validator.

OPF Annual Report highlights the importance of PDF/A!

The Annual Report 2024 from the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) highlights the importance of PDF/A to the preservation community:

  • In September, OPF announced the release of the Arlington PDF Model Checker powered by veraPDF
  • At iPRES 2024, the Great Preservation Bake Off demonstrated veraPDF’s Arlington-based PDF validation
  • veraPDF had the most downloads of any OPF technology during 2024
  • veraPDF 1.26 was released in May includes PDF/UA validation (of machine-checks)
  • JHOVE 1.32’s September release included improvements and bug fixes in its PDF support.

Graphic depicting OPF's 2024 product download highlights. veraPDF leads with 36,985 followed by fido (27,772), JHOVE (4170), jplyzer (3,945) and Viper (2,255).

ISO Committee for Archives & Records Management launches YouTube channel

ISO Technical Committee 46 “Information and documentation” Sub-committee 11 “Archives/records management” (ISO TC 46 SC 11) has launched a dedicated YouTube channel describing their work on archives and records management. This supplements their active LinkedIn Group

PDFacademicBot for January 2025

Abdumannon, B. and Qudratovich, S.S. (October 2024) ‘CONVERT IMAGES TO PDF IN C#’, Eurasian Journal of Mathematical Theory and Computer Sciences, 4(10), pp. 33–39. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13991413.

Allegrezza, S. (2024) ‘Addressing The Problem of File Formats Obsolescence: Italian Guidelines on File Format Conversion for the Long-Term Preservation of Electronic Records’, in iPRES 2024. iPRES 2024 Papers - International Conference on Digital Preservation, Ghent, Belgium. https://doi.org/10.21428/5676bf2d.cf6ac18d.

Boukhers, Z. and Yang, C. (January 2025) ‘Comparison of Feature Learning Methods for Metadata Extraction from PDF Scholarly Documents’. arXiv. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.05082.

Chbib, F., Mustafa, A. and Khatoun, R. (November 2024) ‘Leveraging Machine Learning-Based PDF Malware Detection in Snort’, in 2024 4th International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME). pp. 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECCME62383.2024.10796480.

Devkate, V. et al. (2024) ‘Documentation Management System with PDF Chat’, International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, 12(5), pp. 2869–2874. https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2024.62303.

  1. Dhamodharan and A. Kaleemullah (November 2024) ‘An Innovative Algorithm for Enhanced PDF-Based Chatbot in Domain-Specific Question Answering’, Library Progress International, 44(3), pp. 27648–27653. https://bpasjournals.com/library-science/index.php/journal/article/view/3548.

Eric Kwadwo Amissah, Kwabena Nduro, and Ernest Doe Kudjordjie (2024) ‘Optimizing Workflow Efficiency in Digital Printing Imposition: A Visual Tutorial on Design Impact Printing Methods’, International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research, 6(2), p. 13309. https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2024.v06i02.13309.

Infante, A. et al. (2025) ‘Would ChatPDF be advantageous for expediting the interpretation of imaging and clinical articles in PDF format?’, Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence, 8(0). https://doi.org/10.21037/jmai-24-153.

Keyal, P.K. et al. (September 2024) ‘Efficient Information Digest: Exploring AI-Driven PDF Summarization through Streamlit, Open API, and LangChain’, in 2024 IEEE International Conference on Communication, Computing and Signal Processing (IICCCS). India: IEEE, pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/IICCCS61609.2024.10763576.

Khallouli, W. et al. (January 2025) ‘Leveraging Transformer-Based OCR Model with Generative Data Augmentation for Engineering Document Recognition’, Electronics, 14(1), p. 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14010005.

Ito, T. and Nakagawa, S. (October 2024) ‘Analysis of Important Phrases in Bidding Documents Using Table Encoder Joint Extraction’, in 2024 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering and Economics (CIFEr). IEEE, pp. 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/CIFEr62890.2024.10772782.

Joshi, R. et al. (2024) ‘An Approach to Intelligent Information Extraction and Utilization from Diverse Documents’, in 2024 8th International Conference on Computational System and Information Technology for Sustainable Solutions (CSITSS), pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSITSS64042.2024.10816908.

Li XU et al. (2024) ‘Research on 3D Geospatial PDF Map Data Organization Model’, p. 16. [Chinese language] https://doi.org/10.13203/j.whugis20240227.

Ouyang, L. et al. (2024) ‘OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.07626.

Phuoc, N.C.H., Tan, V.N. and Cam, N.T. (2024) ‘uitPDFXAI: Malicious PDF files detection with eXplainable Artificial Intelligence’, in 2024 14th International Conference on System Engineering and Technology (ICSET). 2024 14th International Conference on System Engineering and Technology (ICSET), pp. 186–191. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSET63729.2024.10775017.

Ran Liu (December 2024) Building an Efficient PDF Malware Detection System. PhD Thesis, Computer Science. University of Maryland. https://www.proquest.com/openview/3b02461d58bdcfd945026f4dd5f7f68d/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.

MAC, A.J. and Ragel, R.G. (January 2025) Document Image Analysis: Table Detection, Analysis And Format Preservation. BrownWalker Press. https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=lang_en&id=UsouEQAAQBAJ 

Richard Nana Kweenu Quayson (2024) THE IMPACT OF MULTIMODAL INPUTS ON USER ADOPTION IN STUDY PLANNING APPLICATIONS. B.Sc. Computer Science. Ashesi University. https://air.ashesi.edu.gh/server/api/core/bitstreams/2e1d58bc-12d2-4a1b-8b24-e29af1dd5ba3/content.

Sheth, R.K. and Parekha, C.D. (2025) ‘The Silent Threat: Safeguarding Against PDF-Based Malware With Intelligent Detection’, in Advanced Cyber Security Techniques for Data, Blockchain, IoT, and Network Protection. IGI Global Scientific Publishing, pp. 245–270. https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-9225-6.ch010.

Shigarov, А.О., (26 November 2024) ‘Table recognition in untagged PDF documents using PDF-specific features’, Journal of Computational Technologies, 6(29), pp. 125–146. [in Russian] https://doi.org/10.25743/ICT.2024.29.6.008.

Solomonov, M. et al. (2025) ‘Can Viewing Modality Affect Frontal Mandibular Bone Height Measurement? A Comparison Between 3D Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine Viewer and Printed Portable Document Format Cone Beam Computer Tomography Reports’, Dentistry Journal, 13(1), p. 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/dj13010022.

Uematsu, T. et al. (November 2024) ‘A New Breast Density Assessment Method Using Portable Document Format’, Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention, 25(11), pp. 3947–3951. https://doi.org/10.31557/APJCP.2024.25.11.3947.

Wang, Y. and Xu, J. (October 2024) ‘Multi-level Fuzzing for Document File Formats with Intermediate Representations’, in 2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), IEEE, pp. 295–306. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00037.

Weaver, C.A. (August 2024) ‘MCNP Output File Conversion (Los Alamos National Laboratory)’. 2024 MCNP User Symposium, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/2440183.

Yamauchi, K. and Katsurai, M. (2025) ‘Investigating Industry-Academia Collaboration in Artificial Intelligence: PDF-Based Bibliometric Analysis from Leading Conferences’, in G. Oliver et al. (eds) Sustainability and Empowerment in the Context of Digital Libraries. Singapore: Springer Nature, pp. 70–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0868-3_5.

Yudin, M. et al. (October 2024) ‘Exposing Vulnerabilities in PDF Malware Detectors to Evasion Attacks’, in MILCOM 2024 - 2024 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), Washington DC, USA: IEEE, pp. 807–814. https://doi.org/10.1109/MILCOM61039.2024.10773945.

Zhu, W., Wong, K. and Kuribayashi, M. (2024) ‘A Permutation-based Reversible Data Hiding Method with Zero Visual Distortion’, 2024 Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, 2024. http://www.apsipa2024.org/files/papers/251.pdf.

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