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

Member Area

PDF Champion 2025

October 2025 by PDF Association staff

This year’s PDF Champion is the man who, as much or more than anyone else, is responsible for launching the institutions that undergird the modern PDF technology industry: Thomas Zellmann.

Thomas has been a steady, energizing presence from the earliest days of the PDF/A Competence Center, which he helped to found in 2006. That organization is now today’s PDF Association thanks a large part to his committment.

In the Competence Centre era Thomas was one of the most visible ambassadors of that mission, speaking and teaching across Europe to help make long-term digital preservation a practical reality for institutions and enterprises. Thomas championed “anything to PDF/A” workflows and promoted archival quality as a first-class requirement, not an afterthought. Our community is stronger because of his work.

On this basis, and as approved by the Board of Directors of the PDF Association, we send our congratulations – and a cube of engraved aluminum – to Thomas Zellmann, PDF Champion for 2025!

This year’s PDF Champion is the man who, as much or more than anyone else, is responsible for launching the institutions that undergird the modern PDF technology industry: Thomas Zellmann.

Thomas has been a steady, energizing presence from the earliest days of the PDF/A Competence Center, which he helped to found in 2006. That organization is now today’s PDF Association thanks a large part to his committment.

In the Competence Centre era Thomas was one of the most visible ambassadors of that mission, speaking and teaching across Europe to help make long-term digital preservation a practical reality for institutions and enterprises. Thomas championed “anything to PDF/A” workflows and promoted archival quality as a first-class requirement, not an afterthought. Our community is stronger because of his work.

On this basis, and as approved by the Board of Directors of the PDF Association, we send our congratulations – and a cube of engraved aluminum – to Thomas Zellmann, PDF Champion for 2025!

When a PDF Becomes Your Conversation Partner

June 2023 by Matthias Wagner
Article


What if you could simply ask a question to a PDF file? What if you could receive answers that are contextually derived, presented in an easily understandable manner, and provided … Read more

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June 2023 by Patrick Gallot
Patrick Gallot
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Patrick Gallot explains his personal financial support for a forthcoming documentary on the development of the PDF format.

Article

June 2023 by Duff Johnson
Duff Johnson
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The last 30 years have revealed some persistent truths about how people use and think about information and communication.

Article

May 2023 by Peter Wyatt
Peter Wyatt
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This new corpus – nearly 8 million PDFs totaling about 8 TB – was gathered from across the web in … Read more

Article

May 2023 by Peter Wyatt
Peter Wyatt
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A new PDF Association service will provide targeted test-cases to highlight interoperability issues resolved in the latest PDF specification.

Article

April 2023 by Tony McKinley
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Author and longtime PDF evangelist Tony McKinley’s latest book, “PDF Expert”, shares his experience working directly with the world’s most … Read more

Article

March 2023 by John Brinkman
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The May meeting of the PDF Forms TWG will begin work on a draft specification for declarative forms in PDF.

Article

March 2023 by Roman Toda
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The Deriving HTML from PDF TWG’s specification is an important part of their program of work as it supports one … Read more

Article

March 2023 by Matthew Hardy
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The goal of the Well-Tagged PDF (WTPDF) specification is to ensure high-quality documents that are suitable for content reuse, extraction, … Read more

Article

March 2023 by Markus Erle
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The PDF Accessibility Liaison Working Group (LWG) is taking aim at providing a full set of techniques to demonstrate correct … Read more

Article

March 2023 by Dietrich von Seggern (callas software GmbH)
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PDF/A – the ISO standard for long-term archiving – now has four sub-standards. This raises an obvious question: which one … Read more

Article

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