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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!

Why PDF 2.0 is the new PDF bible

July 2023 by Thomas Zellmann
Article


Why PDF 2.0 is the definition of PDF every developer should use – even if your products don’t support PDF 2.0.

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June 2023 by Matthias Wagner
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What if you could simply ask a question to a PDF file? What if you could receive answers that are … 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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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