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PDF/A and external references

November 2025 by Peter Wyatt

PDF/A ensures reliable long-term rendering by embedding fonts, images, and color profiles, but URLs can still appear in text, hyperlinks, bookmarks, annotations, metadata, and embedded files.

Link annotations and URI Actions define clickable destinations, but PDF/A restricts certain action types to prevent external dependencies.

Guided by clear policies, comprehensive audits of both visible and hidden references help maintain authenticity, accessibility, and long-term integrity of PDF/A documents and digital collections.

PDF/A ensures reliable long-term rendering by embedding fonts, images, and color profiles, but URLs can still appear in text, hyperlinks, bookmarks, annotations, metadata, and embedded files.

Link annotations and URI Actions define clickable destinations, but PDF/A restricts certain action types to prevent external dependencies.

Guided by clear policies, comprehensive audits of both visible and hidden references help maintain authenticity, accessibility, and long-term integrity of PDF/A documents and digital collections.

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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