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The PDF Association celebrates its members’ public statements
of support
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!

Have we passed ‘peak PDF’?

October 2018 by Duff Johnson
Article


How do we gain insight into how users’ views of documents are shifting? Google Trends is an increasingly interesting source of high-level marketplace data. By aggregating Google’s search data over … Read more

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October 2018 by PDF Association staff
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The PDF Techniques Accessibility Summit’s objective is to establish a broad-based understanding of how PDF files should be tagged for … Read more

Article

September 2018 by PDF Association staff
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The typical adoption curve for PDF technologies until approximately 2007 tended to track with that of the original PDF developer. … Read more

Article

August 2018 by PDF Association staff
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The PDF Techniques Accessibility Summit will identify best-practices in tagging various cases in PDF documents. Questions to be addressed will … Read more

Article

July 2018 by Duff Johnson
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My hospital emailed me a medical records release form as a PDF. They told me to print it, fill it, … Read more

Article

June 2018 by PDF Association staff
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You missed the PDF Days Europe 2018? Never mind! Here you can find the slides and video recordings of all … Read more

Article, PDF Association news

June 2018 by Duff Johnson
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PDF/UA, like PDF itself, is internally complex, but used correctly, actually makes things easier.

Article

May 2018 by PDF Association staff
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Richard Cohn, Principal Scientist at Adobe and the co-author of PDF 1.0, gave the opening keynote at the PDF Days … Read more

Article, PDF Association news

April 2018 by PDF Association staff
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Our Executive Director Duff Johnson gives some personally information about his experience with the “PDF universe” and much more.

Article

April 2018 by Duff Johnson
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In a recent article I discussed using PDF as a container to organize, transport and archive collections of content. Since then … Read more

Article

April 2018 by PDF Association staff
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Here are five reasons why industry professionals in marketing, business development and sales should attend at PDF Days Europe 2018.

Article

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