PDF Days 2022 Outlook: Topic Block 1 - Experiences from the Field

PDF Days 2022 Agenda

Detailed Overview of the Three Topics​

The event was divided by the PDF Association into three tracks: Practical Experiences, Implementation, and Technology. Each track includes several compelling presentations. Below is an overview of all topics.

In the "Experience" track, practical examples and application areas for PDF are discussed. In addition to accessibility, the track also addresses questions such as: What conclusions can be drawn about PDF in connection with the pandemic? What developments are emerging in e-invoicing, digital signatures, and PDF conversion?

Block 1: Experiences from the Field​

  • Presentation by Elodie Tellier focusing on practical questions: "Facing a pandemic: hit and miss of PDF, how could we have done better?"

  • Presentation by Bernd Wild: lessons from 10 years of PDF/A-3-based electronic invoicing. About 10 years ago, invoice exchange began to be digitized. With PDF/A-3 as the container format for XML-based invoice data, the foundation was laid for hybrid documents. This session also covers standards such as ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, Order-X, and Delivery-X.

  • Practical examples by Akash Choudhary: How can PDF/A conversion be simplified? The focus is on conversion to PDF/A-2, PDF/A-3, and PDF/A-4.

  • Another presentation by Bernd Wild: making digital signatures in PDF more usable. Well over 90 percent of all signed documents are PDFs. No other document format offers such deep signature integration. In addition to developments in PDF signature standards, this session includes practical examples such as support for parallel signatures, notarial certifications, long-term preservation of signed PDFs, and mapping of complex signature workflows.

  • Session by Neil Pitman: smart legal contracts and PDF. This session explores key questions for the PDF community: how can the format remain relevant in the world of digital contracts, blockchain and crypto-assets, and browser-based document formats?

  • Another practical contribution from Elodie Tellier: how can better document understanding improve your PDF workflow? This session discusses ways to overcome PDF challenges (layout and text understanding, hierarchy, and relationships between structures). It also covers practical application areas such as OCR, automatic indexing, tagging and labeling, structured layout conversion, and automatic redaction.

  • Automatic extraction of PDF content (Arnd Schöter)

  • Development of messaging in relation to PDF (Peter Rechter)

  • Important contribution by Dirk Frölich (in German) on accessible PDF and Office: creating fully accessible PDF documents according to WCAG or PDF/UA is still not fully possible with Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. Nevertheless, the session highlights current improvements and possibilities.

In the next part, you can learn more about topic block 2 - implementation.