The regulators are coming!

Germany requires e-invoicing starting January 1, 2025

E-invoicing (electronic invoicing) will be mandatory in Germany for B2B transactions starting on 1 January 2025, with transitional rules applying through 2027. ZUGFeRD invoices, which are based on PDF/A-3, will be the default invoice type for many organizations, as only ZUGFeRD invoices provide a human-readable document in addition to machine-readable XML.

ZUGFeRD 2.3 announced

In support of Germany's upcoming e-invoicing requirements, the Forum for Electronic Invoicing Germany (FeRD) has recently announced ZUGFeRD 2.3 (English, German), available as a free download that includes sample ZUGFeRD PDF invoices.

“ZUGFeRD 2.3 and Factur-X 1.0 are fully compatible and technically identical formats that have been using the Factur-X identifier together since March 24, 2020. Both formats are generally suitable for the exchange of invoices between companies, public administration and consumers.

In the hybrid version, the ZUGFeRD invoice format contains the structured invoice data in a PDF/A-3 file, which forms the visible component of the invoice. The structured XML invoice data can be read and processed by the invoice recipient.”

Version 2.3 changes the validation of the EXTENDED profile and FeRD strongly recommends that users of the ZUGFeRD EXTENDED profile update to this latest version.

Implications of the European Accessibility Act (EAA)

In just 9 months (June 2025) the European Accessibility Act goes into full effect. This EU-wide law, among other things, requires that:

• all eBooks sold within the EU meet W3C WCAG guidelines for accessibility, and
• these eBoos are accompanied by metadata which accurately and thoroughly represents the accessible features present in each given eBook product.

PDF Industry Note: This law has obvious implications for PDF files distributed as ebooks. The PDF Association is studying this issue, and is planning collaborations with respective organizations in the publishing space to broaden understanding of how accessible PDF maps to the detailed metadata required by the legislation.

ACM DocEng Proceedings published

The proceedings of the recent 24th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) document engineering conference (known as DocEng) are now available in their digital library: “DocEng '24: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2024”.

Hosted by Adobe's Director of Engineering and PDF Association PDF Reuse TWG chair Matthew Hardy, DocEng’24 was held from August 20-23 at Adobe HQ in San Jose, CA, USA. The conference emphasized: “... innovative approaches to document engineering technology, use of documents and document collections in real-world applications, and novel principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, maintain, share, and productively use these.”

See this month’s PDFacademicBot list for papers that discussed PDF topics.

GWG educational webinar on PDF/X-4

The Ghent Workgroup (GWG) have announced their next educational webinar titled "Your workflow can't handle this" for Thursday, October 17th at 4:00 pm CET. This will introduce the Ghent PDF Output Suite 5.0 — a free collection of test patches designed to check output device (or RIP) handling of all the features in  ISO 15930-7:2010 Graphic technology — Prepress digital data exchange using PDFPart 7: Complete exchange of printing data (PDF/X-4) and partial exchange of printing data with external profile reference (PDF/X-4p) using PDF 1.6.

As shown below (Table 1 in many of the ISO 15930 standards) there are many PDF/X parts and conformance levels, each tailored to a specific print workflow and PDF version. PDF/X-6 is based on PDF 2.0 and added support for per-object black point compensation control, per-page output intents, and MixingHints and SpectralData extensions to output intents.

TC130 approve revision of ISO 19593-1:2018

ISO TC 130 WG 2 has approved a proposal to revise ISO 19593-1:2018 Graphic technology — Use of PDF to associate processing steps and content data — Part 1: Processing steps for packaging and labels, to broaden the scope to include new processing steps data for flexo platemaking.

JHOVE news

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has announced that JHOVE 1.32 is now available. This update includes Improvements and bug fixes for error reporting in the PDF Module and a fix to allow the correct parsing of PDF dates according to the latest ISO 32000-2 specification.

OPF has also announced the formation of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) focused on JHOVE. This is the chance to participate in the future of this digital preservation tool. This working group is aimed towards users (not just developers!) and aims to improve documentation, and understandability, enable the community to understand errors better, develop a searchable registry, improve the tool by identifying bugs, and generally help people get started easier.

World Standards Day on October 14

Each year on 14 October, the members of the IEC, ISO and ITU celebrate World Standards Day, which is a means of paying tribute to the collaborative efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who develop the voluntary technical agreements that are published as International Standards. It is a perfect day to remind the world that PDF continues to evolve as a collaborative and open international standard.

The PDF Association sincerely thanks all our members who contribute their time and expertise to the technical work that drives PDF standardization forward across multiple ISO technical committees. If you have someone in your organization contributing to this work, then World Standards Day is a great opportunity to publicly celebrate their contributions with the hashtags #WorldStandardsDay and #standards4SDGs.

International Print Day on October 23

International Print Day 2024 is an annual international day to celebrate and promote printing to be held on Wednesday, October 23 this year. Use the hashtag #IPD24 with social media posts to promote the benefits of the many PDF-based ISO standards that support the graphics art markets including: PDF/X (ISO 15930), PDF/VT (ISO 16612), PDF/VCR (ISO 16613), Print Product Metadata (ISO 21812), and Processing Steps (ISO 19593).

World Digital Preservation Day on November 7

World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is held on the first Thursday of every November - this year on Thursday, November 7, 2024. Organized by the Digital Preservation Council (DPC) and supported by digital preservation networks around the globe, WDPD is open to participation from anyone interested in securing digital legacy - across all sectors and geographic locations. With the 2024 theme “Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities”, WDPD2024 is a great opportunity to connect the digital preservation community, and to help promote the PDF/A (ISO 19005) series of long-term preservation standards which will be 20 years old next year. Remember to use the hashtag #WDPD2024.

PDF's poster power!

We love a great poster for the (home) office, especially when utilizing the power of PDF and where the content is infinitely scalable and zoomable. These not only look good (especially if you have access to a wide format printer that can print these lifesize!) but are great stress test files for your PDF software in handling small-sized PDFs that are VERY big on content. Try scrolling, zooming, selecting text or copy/paste into another application.

Set of 3 Unicode 10 Hilbert Curve posters

A set of 3 x A1 posters entirely drawn as vector act (not text, not bitmap - ignore “bitmap” in the filenames) via LiveScript and SVG, showing every glyph defined in Unicode 10 (plus a few extras supposedly - of course we didn't check!) along a faint Hibert Curve.

“On the Origins of the Species” by Charles Darwin

The complete text (as PDF text) of “On the Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin overlaid with the iconic outline of the "ascent of man" drawn as shaded vector outlines over the top. A massive 194 x 42 inches (approx. 5m x 1m). 4.1MB. Myriad-Roman.

“Flatlands” by Edwin A. Abbott

The complete text (as PDF text) of “Flatlands” by Edwin A. Abbott, not unironically rendered as a 2D projection of a coloured cube on a 60 x 42 inch (roughly 1m x 1.5m) poster. 1.4MB. Arial Text.

Unicode spiral

We recently rediscovered this old Reddit r/typography thread from 2015 where (most of) the Unicode characters are rendered in a circular spiral radiating from the center. Based on the date this is likely to be Unicode 7.0 or 8.0 but, again, we didn’t check. In the full sized PDF (DropBox link, 18MB), the page is 1m x 1m with each Unicode glyph at approximately 6 pt.

PDFacademicBot for October 2024

Chauhan, A. and Verma, D. (2024) ‘Harnessing Lightweight Ciphers for PDF Encryption’, arXiv.org [Preprint]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09428v1 

Feng, S. (2024) Development of an Automatic Tool to Detect the SD/SE Mix-Up Error in Meta-Analyses. Master’s Degree in Human-Technology Interaction. Eindhoven University of Technology. https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/340291953/Master_Thesis_Report_Sikai_Feng.pdf.

Jiang, N. et al. (2024) ‘LATTE: Improving Latex Recognition for Tables and Formulae with Iterative Refinement’. arXiv. Available at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.14201.

Joguin, V. and Poidevin, F. (August 2024) ‘PDF Hybrid Preservation on Paper’, iPRES 2024, iPRES 2024 Proceedings(2024), p. 16. https://ipres2024.pubpub.org/pub/e8vexg58/release/1 

Kabilan, R., Kumar, D.B.S. and Kumar, D.N.S. (2024) ‘INNOVATIONS AND UPDATES IN PHARMACEUTICAL REGULATORY SUBMISSIONS: CTD MODULE ADVANCEMENTS’, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PROGRESSIVE RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT AND SCIENCE (IJPREMS), 04(08), pp. 971–978. https://www.ijprems.com/uploadedfiles/paper/issue_8_august_2024/35841/final/fin_ijprems1724995834.pdf 

Liu, R., Matuszek, C. and Nicholas, C. (2024) ‘An Efficient PDF Malware Detection Method Using Highly Compact Features’, in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2024. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (DocEng ’24), pp. 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3685650.3685668.

Luna, S.L. et al. (2024) ‘Automatic PDF Document Classification with Machine Learning’. https://xai.w.uib.no/files/2024/09/IDEAL_2024-Llacer.pdf.

Mittelbach, F. et al. (August 2024) ‘Automatically producing accessible and reusable PDFs with LATEX’, in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2024. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (DocEng ’24), pp. 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3685650.3685670.

Thippeswamy, B.M. et al. (July 2024) ‘TextVerse: A Streamlit Web Application for Advanced Analysis of PDF and Image Files with and without Language Models’, in 2024 Asia Pacific Conference on Innovation in Technology (APCIT). 2024 Asia Pacific Conference on Innovation in Technology (APCIT), pp. 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/APCIT62007.2024.10673559.

Wang, H. et al. (August 2024) ‘All Risk Is Local: File Format Risk Assessment in Two U.S. Government Contexts’, iPRES 2024 Proceedings, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384256643_All_Risk_Is_Local_File_Format_Risk_Assessment_in_Two_US_Government_Contexts.