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The PDF Association celebrates its members’ public statements
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for ISO-standardized PDF technology.

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Twenty Years of Trust: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of PDF/A-1

November 2025 by PDF Association staff

This month the PDF industry is celebrating the 20th anniversary of PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005), the publication of which revolutionized digital preservation.

Before this standard, archiving suffered from dependency issues. PDF/A-1, based on a constrained subset of PDF 1.4, mandated self-contained, device-independent documents. These rules ensure that a PDF/A document’s appearance can be reliably maintained over centuries, regardless of viewing software.

Rapidly adopted globally, the principles established in PDF/A-1 persist in later standards like PDF/A-4, which is based on PDF 2.0, the latest ISO standard for PDF.

Happy 20th, PDF/A! We (ok, not us personally) fully expect to be celebrating your 200th anniversary in November 2225!

This month the PDF industry is celebrating the 20th anniversary of PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005), the publication of which revolutionized digital preservation.

Before this standard, archiving suffered from dependency issues. PDF/A-1, based on a constrained subset of PDF 1.4, mandated self-contained, device-independent documents. These rules ensure that a PDF/A document’s appearance can be reliably maintained over centuries, regardless of viewing software.

Rapidly adopted globally, the principles established in PDF/A-1 persist in later standards like PDF/A-4, which is based on PDF 2.0, the latest ISO standard for PDF.

Happy 20th, PDF/A! We (ok, not us personally) fully expect to be celebrating your 200th anniversary in November 2225!

The future of past email is PDF

February 2020 by Prof. Chris Prom
Article


Archives, libraries, and other memory institutions have experimented with PDF for archiving email, but have not widely implemented them as production services. As a result, many organizations are simply storing … Read more

Chris Prom
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February 2020 by Duff Johnson
Duff Johnson
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When people talk to me about PDF technology they are generally pretty happy about it. End users feel that they … Read more

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January 2020 by Duff Johnson
Duff Johnson
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“I’m sorry, Derek, but, now that Kelsey has learned how to convert JPEGs into PDFs, we can’t justify keeping you … Read more

Article

December 2019 by Thomas Zellmann
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Thomas Zellmann discusses the benefits of OCR and of making PDFs fully searchable, especially as input for AI systems.

Article

November 2019 by Klaas Posselt
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The PDF/UA Technical Working Group released Tagged PDF Best Practice Guide: Syntax – to provide developers and expert users with … Read more

Article

November 2019 by Thomas Zellmann
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AI applications for business intelligence processing can extract information from unstructured “born digital” documents, but many archives include years (or … Read more

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November 2019 by Duff Johnson
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Apple’s desktop suite, Pages, Keynote and Numbers, now supports creation of tagged (and thus, accessible and reusable) PDF.

Article

October 2019 by Duff Johnson
Duff Johnson
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As of October 7, 2019, websites and mobile applications in the U.S. will be assessed as “public accommodations”, and the … Read more

Article

October 2019 by Thomas Zellmann
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To survive a great flood Noah brought pairs from every species aboard his ark. But is this approach – gathering … Read more

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September 2019 by Duff Johnson
Duff Johnson
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Earlier this year we covered the release of the Mueller Report covering the Special Counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in … Read more

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August 2019 by Dietrich von Seggern
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This article was recently updated. The new version was posted on February 16, 2021. PDF is one of the most … Read more

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