As we kick off the New Year, we’re looking back on 2025, a year defined by important product advancements, stronger developer guidance, and a growing library of technical content designed to help businesses and engineers do more with their documents.  

In the same vein, we’re looking ahead to 2026 and what developers can implement in their PDF workflows moving forward. 

From powerful new features in Adobe PDF Library to expanded samples, tutorials, and industry-focused articles, this was a year that was focused on a developer-first approach. We plan to continue that momentum in 2026 as well.    

Product Advancements

OCR Advancements in Adobe PDF Library

2025 introduced a leap forward in text extraction and image-to-PDF capabilities using OCR (Optical Character Recognition): 

• New C++ OCR functionality in Adobe PDF Library lets developers convert images into fully searchable, text-extractable PDF documents. 
• A new OCR sample for C++ shows exactly how to leverage these capabilities. 
• We also delivered an OCREngine plugin, giving users more flexible OCR API access across workflows. 

These updates make APDFL an even stronger foundation for intelligent document workflows. 

Security & Compliance Enhancements 

We continued tightening security by upgrading key libraries: 

• ICU updated to 77.1 
• libexpat updated to 2.7.3 
• fmt and other dependencies modernized 

We also achieved SOC 2 Type 2 Certification through Prescient Security, marking a significant committment to keeping customer/client data secure. 

These improvements help organizations stay ahead of vulnerabilities, maintain compliance, and deploy safer, more stable PDF processing pipelines.   

Digital Signing Improvements 

One of the year’s standout features was the addition of Timestamp/RFC 3161 digital signatures, now supported in APDFL (with platform-specific exceptions).  This gives businesses greater control and assurance when embedding time-verified trust into their documents.     

A Growing Content Library for Developers, IT Teams & Business Leaders 

We significantly expanded our blog and knowledgebase content to help users understand not just the how, but the why of effective PDF workflows. 

We continued building out industry content showing how sectors like legal, insurance, finance, and government can unlock efficiency using APDFL, pdfRest, and our enterprise tools. 

Industry Insights

We also focused on the future of PDF technology by adding in TDMRep protocols to APDFL and PDF Optimizer to allow our users to prevent AI from scraping, searching, and mining their documents. 

Additionally, we dove into the conversation around Brotli, an emerging technology in the PDF industry that promises to deliver better compression than ever before.  These pieces helped bring real-world context to the capabilities we offer.   

Modern Deployment: Containers, APIs & Scalable Infrastructure 

2025 also saw major interest in our pdfRest API Toolkit Container:  a containerized, Docker-ready way to deploy powerful PDF processing in private or public cloud environments from our pdfRest division. 

We expanded supporting content and samples to help developers: 

• Deploy faster 
• Scale more confidently 
• Integrate dozens of PDF tools into automated workflows 

This offering helped modernize the way developers run high-volume PDF operations.   

Stronger Support & Developer Experience 

Our support team continued to shine this year with faster onboarding, deeper product guidance, and new examples that help customers resolve complex PDF challenges quickly.  We also published more content highlighting: 

• What our support engineers can help with 
• How customers use APDFL in production 
• Real reviews and stories from the developers we assist every day    

Looking Ahead to 2026 (and beyond) 

As we enter 2026, we're carrying forward the momentum from 2025, including: 

• More automation-focused content 
• Expanded OCR and AI-assisted workflows 
• Broader sample libraries 
• More secure, more powerful document processing tools 
• Enhanced container and cloud deployment options 
• Better user experience across our website and documentation sites 

Our users can expect to see more enhancements to our offerings as well as the ability to implement everything we’ve covered in this post. Thanks for supporting us in 2025 and we hope to have an even more exciting 2026!