PDF Days 2022 – Outlook Topic Block 1 – Experiences from the field

Our detailed overview of the three topics

The event was divided by the PDF Association into three blocks: Practical Experiences, Implementation and Technology. There will be some exciting contributions to each topic area. Here you will find an overview of all topics.

In the “Experience” block of topics, some concrete practical examples and areas of application of PDF will be discussed. In addition to the topic of accessibility, it will also deal with questions such as: What conclusion can be drawn regarding the PDF format in connection with the pandemic? Or what developments are there with regard to invoicing, digital signatures and PDF conversion?

Block 1 – Experiences from the field:

• Interesting presentation by Elodie Tellier focusing on questions from the field: “Facing a pandemic: hit and miss of PDF, how could we have done better?”
• Presentation by Bernd Wild: Conclusion from 10 years of PDF/A-3 based electronic invoicing. About 10 years ago, the exchange of invoices began to be digitised. With PDF/A-3 as the carrier format and wrapper for XML-based invoice data, the foundation was laid for the use of hybrid documents. Here you can learn more about the developments as a whole and more about different standard versions such as ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, Order-X and Delivery-X.
• Concrete practical examples by Akash Choudhary: How can PDF/A conversion be simplified? More on conversion to PDF/A versions such as 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 PDF. No other document format has such a deep integration of signatures. Here, in addition to the concrete development of the digital signature component in the PDF standard, practical examples will be discussed, such as the support of parallel signatures, notarial certifications, long-term storage of signed PDFs and the mapping of complex signature workflows.
• Session by Neil Pitman: Smart Legal Contracts and PDF: Specific, important questions for the PDF community, how can the format survive in the future in the world of digital contracts, blockchain and crypto-assets, and in-browser document formats?
• Another practical contribution from Elodie Tellier: How can better document understanding improve your PDF workflow? This presentation will discuss ways to overcome the challenges of PDF (layout and text understanding, hierarchy and relationships between different structures). It also discusses many practical application areas such as OCR, automatic indexing, tagging & labelling, conversion of structured layout and automatic redaction.
• Automatic extraction of PDF content (Arnd Schöter)
• Development of messaging with reference to PDF (Peter Rechter)
• Important contribution by Dirk Frölich (in German) on the topic of accessible PDF and Office: The creation of fully accessible PDF documents according to WCAG or PDF/UA is still not possible with Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. Nevertheless, it can be shown which improvements and possibilities exist in the meantime.

In the next part you will learn more about topic block 2 – Implementation