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PDF Differences – one year later

November 2024 by Peter Wyatt

Repeatable, reliable rendering and functionality are at the very heart of PDF’s value to users.

The synthetic targeted test files provided by the PDF Association in the public pdf-differences GitHub repository are specifically designed to make the changes in the latest PDF specification, ISO 32000-2:2020 as visually understandable as possible.  Each case is built around a past issue discussed by PDF experts at the PDF Association or ISO tables and resulted in corrections or clarifications to the PDF specification (ISO 32000-2:2020 including errata set 2).

In late 2023 the PDF Association publicly released the first set of cases. While many cases relate to page rendering, some relate to other important end-user functionality such as support for page labels (see this article) and testing for unknown filters (especially important in preparation for future PDF changes, see this article).

Although some implementations have made corrections in the past 12 months, it is clear that many have not – as a result, many implementations continue to fail to support PDF correctly leading to visual differences between implementations which can be extremely confusing and frustrating for users.

NARA updates its guidance on OCR and PDF collections

November 2024 by PDF Association staff
PDF in the Wild


New guidance on PDF Portable Collections and on digitizing paper. | US Army website features PDF/UA | PDFism! | Scratch-and-sniff PDF? | NARA’s new blog | Bit List says PDF … Read more

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October 2024 by PDF Association staff
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In 2025 Europe will require ebooks to be accessible and include detailed accessibility metadata while Germany will require e-invoicing. | … Read more

PDF in the Wild

September 2024 by PDF Association staff
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File type for downloadable forms, in 3 letters | Mobile devices are pain-points for forms | But, Android support for … Read more

PDF in the Wild

August 2024 by PDF Association staff
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Devs must VALIDATE before applying ISO-standardized subset metadata to PDFs! | PDF Week Prague accommodations | OPF patches JHOVE | … Read more

PDF in the Wild

July 2024 by PDF Association staff
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Wired likes PDF/A, Google and Apple do PDF creation from phone cameras, EA-PDF is already in the wild, the latest … Read more

PDF in the Wild

June 2024 by PDF Association staff
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What do “first class companies” do? Japanese media covers the PDF Association in Tokyo. Firefox adds experimental alt. text generation … Read more

PDF in the Wild

May 2024 by PDF Association staff
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Microsoft deepens its investment in Tagged PDF. We talked PDF with NISO. Both Android and iOS improve PDF handling. A … Read more

PDF in the Wild

April 2024 by PDF Association staff
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Hugging Face.AI examines PDF. New PDF support in Android. Google reinvents a 31 year-old PDF feature. FireFox wants you to … Read more

PDF in the Wild

March 2024 by PDF Association staff
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The latest veraPDF release candidate adds PDF/UA-2 support. LibreOffice creates PDF/A and PDF/UA together. A “white paper” gets PDF wrong, … Read more

PDF in the Wild

February 2024 by PDF Association staff
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PDF Week Online 2024 week 2 is coming up! Did you know that PDF 2.0 adds ARIA to PDF? How … Read more

PDF in the Wild

January 2024 by PDF Association staff
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LibreOffice now supports PDF/UA! AI LLMs’ support for PDF is substandard, and is retarding innovation. Yet more misinformation about malware. … Read more

PDF in the Wild

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