From PostScript to PDF/X – the development of PDF standards and their influence on the printing industry What does PDF have to do with graphic arts and the printing industry? The 20th anniversary of the first ISO PDF/X standard at the beginning of 2021 can be used as an opportunity to take a closer look…
Last year’s PDF Days once again offered a lot of input and news on the topic of PDF developments. In addition to the PDF ISO standards, the focus was as always on presenting the variety of PDF applications and newly developed solutions. Due to the Covid pandemic, the use of digital technologies has become more…
With the publication of PDF 2.0 in 2017 (first revision in 2020), new parts of the standard were also made available. These concern the formats PDF/A, PDF/VT, PDF/R and PDF/X. They were improved and adapted. Since PDF 2020, PDF/X-6 is now recommended as the successor to PDF/X-4 for professional printing. PDF/X-5 was based on PDF…
From the very beginning, PDF technology has lived on constant further developments and adaptations, which then also affect media designers, designers or the printing industry. This is a factor that should not be underestimated, especially nowadays. One example of such developments is the work with transparencies: Today we are used to being able to create…
Now that the most important event of the year around PDF technology and software has been completed and the PDF Association’s Online PDF Days 2021 has ended successfully with 38 webinars and over 2,000 registered participants, we would like to give a brief insight into the upcoming, further developments at the PDF Association. The PDF…
Accessibility and PDF/UA PDF and accessibility – a broad field that also brings potential for conflict. Whether in the analogue or digital world, the topic of accessibility is a complex one and can be viewed from many different angles. An environment is considered barrier-free if it has been designed in such a way that it…
What exactly does an accessible PDF look like? After our general introduction (part 1/3), what exactly accessibility means, this second part will show how an accessible PDF document can look like. First of all: In general, a PDF document should always be easy to read, here pay attention to appropriate layout/high contrast, so that even…
Using OCR for PDF? Isn’t that a contradiction? You might think so at first, since PDF documents are already digital and OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) is primarily known for helping to digitise paper documents. However, OCR can also help to facilitate work with PDF documents and a good OCR tool should be able to…
For a long time, the rumour has persisted that PDFs cannot be accessible. Unfortunately, this assumption also persists because the possibilities that exist are used far too seldom and are sometimes less well known. The tags and techniques for making PDFs accessible to all people need to be known and, above all, are simply less…
The PDF format is considered to be an interoperable file format, which is especially convincing due to its clear and reliable appearance. In addition, the format brings commonly defined, expected behaviors to all implementations and is continuously being adapted and improved. This includes reporting errors and problems on a regular basis. This is intended to…