EA-PDF isn’t published yet, but it’s already catching on!

Wired likes PDF/A

The longstanding tech magazine suggests that open formats are critical to long-term archiving. The author misses that PDF is itself an open standard, and not just PDF/A, but otherwise this piece may help end users to understand why they should care:

“Basically, if a file on your computer can only be opened by a specific piece of software, and that software is controlled by a single company, you should probably export it to an open format. It's the only way to future-proof it.”

EA-PDF isn’t published yet, but it’s already catching on!

Open source developers are implementing the PDF Association’s forthcoming specification before it’s published!

The latest Samsung folding phone rocks PDF

This reviewer is so excited about the PDF-related features in the latest Galaxy Z Fold 6 phone that she featured them in her subtitle: “Features like PDF translation and a real time interpreter should have been part of the package from the beginning.”

Some really BAD advice on redaction!

Whatever else you do, DON’T redact your documents using the means that this article suggests! We hope this was a joke…

Google and Apple’s mobile platforms deepen PDF integration

Within this past month The Verge reported that both Google’s Drive for Android and standard tools on the iPhone now support PDF creation using your phone’s camera.

Yet Another Social Hack Abusing Trust in PDF (YASHAT-PDF)

Although not an issue with PDF or PDF software, Ars Technica reports on this zero-day attack that tricks users with a special kind of link file that masquerades as a PDF, targeting the trust that users place in PDF documents:

“A link that appeared to open a PDF file appended a .url extension to the end of the file, for instance, Books_A0UJKO.pdf.url, found in one of the malicious code samples. … When viewed in Windows, the file showed an icon indicating the file was a PDF rather than a .url file. Such files are designed to open an application specified in a link. … When viewed in Windows, the file showed an icon indicating the file was a PDF rather than a .url file. Such files are designed to open an application specified in a link.”

Google doesn’t think PDF files are apps

Google’s Play Store has long been known for having lots of “apps” that are simply bogus, one way or the other. Among other types of “apps” they’ll be culling are PDF files that pretend to be apps.

PDFacademicBot for July, 2024

Akio Fujiyoshi (Feb. 2024) ‘A Tool for Improving Readability of Japanese PDF Files for the Print Disabled and People with Foreign Roots’, in The 5th International Workshop on Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science. DEIMS2024, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan: DEIMS, pp. 109–112. https://workshop.sciaccess.net/deims2024/DEIMS2024_Proceedings.zip.

Chelliah, B.J. et al. (April 2024) ‘Harnessing T5 Large Language Model for Enhanced PDF Text Comprehension and Q&A Generation’, in 2024 International Conference on Computing and Data Science (ICCDS). 2024 International Conference on Computing and Data Science (ICCDS), pp. 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCDS60734.2024.10560390.

P Deekshita et al. (April 2024) ‘PDF CHAT_BOT USING GENERATIVE AI (LLMS&RAG)’, Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Optimization, 15(1), pp. 1727–1732. https://doi.org/10.36893/JNAO.2024.V15101.1727-1732.

Koch, L. et al. (July 2024) ‘On the Abuse and Detection of Polyglot Files’. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01529.

Moore, R. (Feb. 2024) ‘Fully Accessible PDF/UA documents. Case study: NOAA fish stock reports’, in The 5th International Workshop on Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science. DEIMS2024, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan: DEIMS, pp. 85-94. http://science.mq.edu.au/~ross/TaggedPDF/DEIMS2024/.

Osthof, L.M., Schwarz, T. and Müller, K. (2024) ‘Testing Usability of Tools for Making PDFs Accessible: Pressing Issues and Pain Points’, in K. Miesenberger, P. Peňáz, and M. Kobayashi (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs 2024, Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), pp. 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_7. Google Books https://bit.ly/4bR4r8a

Paudel, P. et al. (July 2024) ‘Optimizing Nepali PDF Extraction: A Comparative Study of Parser and OCR Technologies’. arXiv [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.04577.

Pierrès, O., Schmitt-Koopmann, F. and Darvishy, A. (2024) ‘PDF Accessibility in International Academic Publishers’, in K. Miesenberger, P. Peňáz, and M. Kobayashi (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2024, Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 38–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_5. Google Books https://bit.ly/4bR4r8a

Salame, G.C. et al. (June 2024) ‘A relational rule-based system for PDF malware detection’, Journal of Information and Optimization Sciences, 45(4), pp. 925–934. https://doi.org/10.47974/JIOS-1616.

Shah, A.K. et al. (July 2024) ‘ChemScraper: leveraging PDF graphics instructions for molecular diagram parsing’, International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-024-00486-7.

Sharma, S. et al. (2024) ‘NEPATEC1.0: First Large-Scale Text Corpus of National Environmental Policy Act PDF Documents’. [Preprint] https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL_PolicyAI_Dataset_Model_Release_IR_06_26.pdf

Stanisavljević, V. and Bernik, A. (May 2024) ‘On Word-Processing Literacy in Publicly Available Documents’, in 2024 47th MIPRO ICT and Electronics Convention (MIPRO). 2024 47th MIPRO ICT and Electronics Convention (MIPRO), pp. 1035–1040. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIPRO60963.2024.10569907.

Sumon, S. and Cheok, S. (July 2024) ‘Semantic Segmentation of PDF Document Characteristics for Rapid Printer Configuration’, [Preprint]. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29519.50087.

Suryani, M.A. et al. (June 2024) ‘A Framework to Transform Metadata and Document-Level Tabular Spatial Information and Measurements to Marine Geology Gazetteer’, in J.A. Lossio-Ventura et al. (eds) Information Management and Big Data. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 273–287. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63616-5_21.

Szentirmai, A.B., Inal, Y. and Torkildsby, A.B. (July 2024) ‘The Accessibility Paradox: Can Research Articles Inspecting Accessibility Be Inaccessible?’, in K. Miesenberger, P. Peňáz, and M. Kobayashi (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_6.

Toda, R. et al. (Feb. 2024) ‘PDF Document Object Model Support for Math’, in The 5th International Workshop on Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science. DEIMS2024, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan: DEIMS, pp. 65-68. https://workshop.sciaccess.net/deims2024/DEIMS2024_Proceedings.zip.

Yin, A. et al. (July 2024) ‘“Malicious” Pictorials: How Alt Text Matters to Screen Reader Users’ Experience of Image-Dense Media"’, in Designing Interactive Systems Conference. DIS ’24: Designing Interactive Systems Conference, IT University of Copenhagen Denmark: ACM, pp. 1262–1274. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660747.