PDF Days Europe 2022 – Berlin Recap

Datalogics attended and sponsored the PDF Days Europe event in Berlin in September, and it was the first in-person event hosted by the PDF Association since 2019. While there were virtual events during this gap, spending time with the Association community in person is always educational as the members and attendees are all either partners, customers, or competitors of Datalogics, and a select few of the participants can be considered all 3 of these. I learned as much from the random conversations in the hallway as I did from the presentations.

DL has been a long-time member and supporter of the Association as its Mission Statement since 2015 has aligned well with our own goals:

To promote Open Standards-based electronic document implementations using PDF technology through education, expertise, and shared experience for stakeholders worldwide.

After the formal conference ended, the Association board met and among other topics, they discussed revising this mission statement to focus more on specification and standards development and away from promotion of the PDF ecosystem. The final verbiage was not decided, but a new statement of mission is expected soon.

The sessions and presentations offered a wealth of information that was broken down into three tracks that ran concurrently. These were the Experience, Implementation and Core Technology tracks. As I couldn’t be in 3 places at once, I must await the publication of the presentation videos from the sessions I could not attend. It should be noted that while PDF has been an ISO standard since 2007, and the specification is no longer controlled by Adobe, the folks at Adobe are still very engaged with PDF and the PDF community and gave 4 of the 30 presentations at this event. Videos of all of these are expected to be available on the Association website in November.  There are already over 500 presentation videos on the Association website from previous association events and several of these were given by members of the Datalogics team.

Patrick Gallot represents Datalogics on the PDF Association Board of Directors and gave two presentations in the Core Technology track this time:

PDF Optimization Horror Stories

Leveling Up RichMedia

Patrick is a contributor and the chairperson of the Rich Media Technical Work Group, one of more than a dozen technical working groups (TWGs) and liaison working groups (LWGs) currently active within the association. The mission of the Rich Media TWG is:

The Rich Media Technical Working Group (TWG) provides PDF Association members with a forum for the development of guidance and best practice on the use of PDF 2.0 RichMedia annotations.

A post-event survey came out after the sessions ended asking for feedback about the quantity and quality of the content that was presented. The quality was great, and the quantity worked for me as well. The 2 cents I added was that if the next event was in North America, Datalogics would want to send more of our team to participate and engage. This was certainly worth the trip, and I came back with a laundry list of ideas to pursue.

Until next time!

Kevin