Looking back at PDF Days

With the curtain now down on PDF Days Europe 2025, the PDF community can look back on a program that blended hard-won wisdom with forward-looking discussion about AI, accessibility, authenticity, and the evolving user experience around ISO-standardized PDF.

The PDF Days agenda delivered both breadth and depth; from plenary keynotes to educational presentations, poster sessions, elevator pitches and working group reports. There was plenty of time and space for attendees, PDF Association members and non-members alike, to connect, compare notes, and chart what comes next.

According to PDF Association Board of Directors chair Raf Hens:

"The event showcased what makes the PDF ecosystem unique: a standards-driven, industry-wide collaboration where vendors, implementers, researchers, and users shape the future together."

The opening morning set the tone. Following CEO Duff Johnson's welcome the Monday keynote, by Professor Dr. Phillipp Hacker on “The role of AI in rapidly reshaping content creation, management, and authenticity” framed the stakes for documents in an AI-infused world in which efficiency, provenance, and trust are dominant themes. The challenge of harnessing AI without sacrificing reliability echoed across tracks and hallway conversations, anchoring discussions about metadata, signatures, verification, and the responsibilities of toolmakers and content owners alike.

From there, three parallel presentation tracks allowed attendees to curate their own journeys.

Kevin De Vorsey’s "PDF 2030” encouraged the crowd to ask how platform shifts, user expectations, and emerging standards should shape priorities. Track B’s “Modern invisible ink – Understanding hidden information in PDF” drilled into the realities of content that users don’t see but that downstream systems must handle correctly; the “hidden” structures that can both empower workflows and (if mishandled) introduce risk. Meanwhile, Track C’s “Tagged PDF in the Wild” introduced practical evidence from real-world documents about trends in the use of PDF’s reuse and accessibility mechanisms.

The event also leaned into discussion and networking opportunities via the two poster sessions; Technical (non-commercial) Posters on Day 1 and Solutions Posters on Day 2. Posters give space to tell a story, and those submitted for PDF Days did not disappoint. They covered experimental results, novel extraction techniques, tagging pipelines and and other subjects. Attendees didn’t just browse… they questioned assumptions, swapped implementation notes and voted for the best Technical poster! These sessions were a new feature at PDF Days, and by all accounts they were very popular. We’ll cover the poster sessions further – and provide the posters themselves – in a future post.

Afternoon sessions kept the momentum. “Collaborative PDF” explored how richer co-authoring, annotation, and review models can live comfortably within durable, interoperable PDF workflows. “PDF Forensics and the Metadata conundrum” surfaced the double-edged sword of descriptive data—vital for discovery and compliance, but also a source of privacy and governance challenges. “Understanding the structure of PDF tables and extracting data from them” addressed one of the field’s most persistent demands: getting reliable, semantically meaningful tabular data out of heterogeneous documents for analytics and automation.

Security and authenticity were recurring themes of the event. “Document security and authenticity” unpacked threat models and trust chains in a world where documents are ingested by both people and machines, while “HTML and PDF, best of Frenemies” made the case for practical coexistence—leveraging each medium’s strengths rather than forcing false choices. “Beyond Automation” advocated approaches to accessibility that meet users where they are. Taken together, this cluster of talks highlighted a sober truth: “smart” pipelines only matter if their outputs are robust, perceivable, and verifiable by humans and systems alike.

Day 2 doubled down on accessibility and production realities. Alexander Pfingstl’s “Accessible Digital Documents” keynote opened the morning, followed by the traditional fast-pasted “Elevator Pitches” from sponsors. “Working with Techniques for accessible PDF” connected the dots between standards guidance and in-the-trenches authoring/remediation practice, while “When PDF is production critical” addressed scale and reliability in enterprise print workflows. “In Defense of the Incremental Save” reminded everyone of the value of this long-standing feature of PDF.

Inevitably, AI returned to the stage with “Empowering the Future of PDF with AI” and “PDF, AI, and Data Protection: Can Smart Be Safe?”, both emphasizing privacy-preserving design and clear lines between generative convenience and verifiable truth. “Tagged and Accessible PDF with LaTeX — revisited” spotlighted the steady progress in STEM publishing, where MathML-aware, semantically rich outputs are becoming table stakes for inclusive reading and reuse. Rounding out the arc, “Breaking Good” and “PDF Between the Lines: Specification, De Facto Standards, and the Coming UX Shift” invited attendees to look past formal texts to the lived reality of interoperability and user expectations, ensuring that specs, implementations, and UX evolve together.

Community is the secret sauce of PDF's technology ecosystem, and the agenda reflected this reality. The “Working Group Reports” session gave the community a chance to hear from working group chairs on community roadmaps and invite new contributors.

If there was a unifying takeaway from PDF Days it was this: durable, accessible, and trustworthy documents are critical to modern business. Whether you came to discuss AI and provenance, to improve table extraction, to sharpen your accessibility practice, or just to talk to the vendors, PDF Days Europe 2025 provided the mix of substance and collaboration that keeps this community moving.

Congratulations to the speakers, sponsors, and every attendee who brought questions and curiosity. We'll see you at the next PDF Days, with more ideas, more collaboration, and the same shared commitment to reliable, interoperable, and human-centered documents!