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Sponsored ISO standards for PDF technology

Available at no cost exclusively from the PDF Association

Although users worldwide benefit from PDF, adoption of ISO standardized PDF technology has lagged because:

  • a significant portion of the ecosystem can’t or won’t pay for expensive ISO publications.
  • developers and end-users of PDF don’t know what they are missing, since the key on-ramps to adoption — improved documentation, new features, clarifications and resolution of ambiguities — are only available to licensees of the respective ISO standards.

Without a no-cost specification it’s very hard to reach all these developers, institutions and other users.

Thanks to a collaboration between the PDF Association and leading PDF technology companies we are able to make specific ISO standards (principally, ISO 32000-2 and ISO 14289 (PDF/UA) publicly available at no cost.

Sign up to receive occasional updates on the latest ISO standards and errata.

The latest ISO 32000-2:2020 (PDF 2.0)

UPDATED JULY 30, 2024

The PDF Association and leading PDF technology companies, Adobe, Apryse and Foxit, have made the latest ISO standard for PDF technology — ISO 32000-2 (PDF 2.0) available to the public at no cost.

Download the ISO 32000-2 bundle NOW!

Covers of 5 ISO standards in the ISO 32000-2 bundle, updated July 2024.

This bundle includes:

For convenience, this bundle includes formal PDF Association publications pertaining to PDF 2.0.

Background

Since 1993, PDF developers were free to openly read and implement the then-current specifications: PDF 1.0 - 1.7. This freedom was critical to PDF’s success. In 2017, ISO 32000-2 became the first ISO standard defining PDF entirely developed in a vendor-neutral forum under ISO processes.

In addition to adding important new features, ISO 32000-2 — the result of research, testing and debate by experts from around the world — resolves thousands of ambiguities from earlier specifications.

ISO 32000-2 was also, however, the first and only core PDF specification published exclusively — and only for purchase — by ISO, inhibiting its use and adoption between 2017 and 2023. That changed on April 5, 2023. As of that date, all PDF developers and users were able to access the most modern, vendor-neutral and up-to-date specification of the PDF format, including the latest, state-of-the-art cryptography in PDF 2.0.

PDF/UA (ISO 14289) & ISO TS 32005

ANNOUNCED August 12, 2024

The PDF Association and leading PDF accessibility companies Allyant, Axes4, CDP Communications and TargetStream Technologies, have made the ISO standards for accessibility in PDF technology available at no cost.

Download the PDF/UA bundle NOW!

Covers of 3 ISO standards in the PDF/UA bundle.

This bundle includes:

For convenience, this bundle includes formal PDF Association publications pertaining to PDF/UA.

Background

PDF’s Tagged PDF feature, introduced to the PDF file format in 2001, makes it possible to add semantic markup to content on PDF pages, enabling accessibility, semantic analysis and reuse.

PDF/UA-1 was first published in 2012 by ISO, subsequently updated in 2014, and is now referenced worldwide by developers and users targeting "the gold standard" for accessibility in PDF files that conform to PDF 1.7, which was ISO-standardized in 2008 as ISO 32000-1.

After 2014 the development of PDF 2.0 prompted PDF Association members to begin development of a new document to provide developers with comprehensive requirements for software that seeks to create or consume fully reusable and accessible PDF 2.0 files in an interoperable manner. In early 2024, after ten years of development by the PDF/UA Technical Working Group (TWG) and PDF Reuse TWG, this objective was realized with the publication of the WTPDF specification, and the subsequent ISO standardization of WTPDF's conformance level for accessibility as ISO 14289-2 (PDF/UA-2).

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