Conference April 2010 📍 Berlin, Germany

PDF Days Europe 2010 — Berlin: PDF/A Adoption, ISO 32000-1, and Open Source PDF

PDF Days Europe 2010, held in Berlin in April 2010, was one of the first conferences held after PDF 1.7 became ISO 32000-1 in 2008. The event explored the impact of ISO standardisation on PDF adoption, the state of open-source PDF implementations, and PDF/A deployment across European enterprises and public sector bodies.

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Key takeaways

ISO 32000-1 (2008) had changed the landscape — PDF was now unambiguously an open standard with royalty-free patent licensing.
Five years of PDF/A-1 production deployments yielded consistent lessons: exception handling, font embedding, and validation timing were the key operational challenges.
PDF/A-2 was anticipated for 2011 — transparency support and JPEG2000 compression were the most anticipated additions.
The open-source PDF ecosystem was robust but lacked an authoritative open-source PDF/A validator — organisations used commercial tools for conformance checking.
Approximately 170 attendees from archives, financial services, legal technology, and PDF software vendors.

PDF Days Europe 2010 was held in Berlin in April 2010 — the first major European PDF conference held after PDF 1.7 had been standardised as ISO 32000-1 in 2008, and as PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1, published 2005) was reaching significant enterprise deployment across European public sector and financial services organisations. The event carried a particular significance: for the first time, PDF was unambiguously an open international standard rather than a proprietary Adobe format. ISO 32000-1 gave organisations confidence to build long-term infrastructure around PDF without concerns about vendor lock-in or licence changes. The PDF Association (PDFA) was founded in 2006 specifically to promote and support the open PDF standards, and PDF Days Europe 2010 was one of its earliest flagship events. Approximately 170 delegates attended from national archives, document management vendors, insurance companies, banks, legal technology firms, and standards bodies.

The impact of ISO 32000-1: PDF as an open standard

The most significant context for PDF Days Europe 2010 was the 2008 publication of ISO 32000-1 — the standardisation of PDF 1.7. Before 2008, PDF was technically open-documented (Adobe published the spec openly) but controlled: Adobe held the patents and could theoretically change or restrict the format. ISO 32000-1 changed this: it included a royalty-free patent licence from Adobe for implementations of the standard, making PDF genuinely open for any organisation to implement. Sessions examined what this meant practically. European public sector bodies — particularly in the Nordics, Germany, and the Netherlands, where PDF/A was already policy — now had legal certainty for long-term archiving investment. Open-source implementations (Ghostscript, Poppler, iText) could be deployed without patent risk. And the standards development process for future PDF versions would be under ISO governance, not Adobe's unilateral control. The comparison with HTML's standardisation journey (from Netscape/Microsoft proprietary extensions to W3C open standards) was frequently drawn — PDF's ISO standardisation was seen as the same kind of inflection point.

PDF/A-1 deployment: lessons from five years of production

PDF/A-1 had been published in 2005 and by 2010 had been in production use for five years. Sessions featured case studies from European national archives, insurance companies, and legal document services that had deployed PDF/A at scale — and the lessons they had learned. Common themes across case studies: - **Exception handling**: PDF/A-1 conversion fails for documents with transparency, JavaScript, or external references. A production workflow must categorise exceptions and handle them — whether by removing the offending feature, archiving in a different format, or accepting a documented deviation. - **Font embedding failures**: The most common failure mode in document-to-PDF/A conversion was missing or non-embeddable fonts. Organisations learned to standardise on font stacks with full embedding rights (not restricted fonts). - **Validation at creation vs at archive**: Some organisations validated PDF/A conformance at document creation (in the authoring system); others validated at archive time. Creation-time validation caught problems earlier; archive-time validation was a safety net for documents created outside controlled systems. - **File size growth**: PDF/A's requirement to embed all fonts and resources meant PDF/A files were typically 10–30% larger than equivalent non-conforming PDFs. Storage cost was a genuine concern for high-volume environments.

PDF/A-2 horizon: what European organisations were planning

With PDF/A-2 in development and expected to be published in 2011, sessions at PDF Days Europe 2010 focused on forward planning. The transparency support in PDF/A-2 was the most discussed addition — many European publishers, insurance companies, and legal firms were maintaining two workflows (one for transparent-content documents, one for PDF/A-1-compliant documents) and were eager to simplify. The JPEG2000 compression addition was of significant interest to organisations archiving scanned documents at scale. European national archives were managing millions of scanned historical documents, many as high-resolution TIFF images. JPEG2000, with its better compression ratios at equivalent visual quality, would meaningfully reduce storage costs for these large raster-heavy archives. Speakers from the standards community previewing PDF Days Europe 2011 confirmed that the 2011 event would mark PDF/A-2's publication and begin the transition planning conversation in earnest.

Open-source PDF tools: the 2010 landscape

By 2010, the open-source PDF ecosystem was robust but still maturing. Ghostscript was the primary open-source PDF/PS interpreter, capable of conversion and rendering but with limitations in PDF/A conformance output. Poppler was the dominant Linux PDF rendering library. iText (then iText 5) was the leading Java PDF generation library, with commercial licensing required for production use in proprietary applications. Sessions explored how European government and enterprise organisations were building PDF processing pipelines using these tools, and where they supplemented open-source with commercial tools for specific operations (PDF/A validation, digital signature support, OCR). The challenge of PDF/A validation with open-source tools was particularly acute: no authoritative open-source PDF/A validator existed in 2010. The veraPDF project — which would become the reference implementation — was still several years in the future. Organisations used Acrobat Preflight, Callas pdfToolbox, or commercial API validators for conformance checking.

Frequently asked questions

When was PDF standardised as an ISO standard?

PDF 1.7 was published as ISO 32000-1:2008 by ISO in July 2008. Adobe submitted the PDF 1.7 specification to ISO and granted a royalty-free patent licence for ISO 32000-1 implementations. This made PDF a genuine open standard — freely implementable by any organisation without proprietary licensing. The next major version, PDF 2.0, was published as ISO 32000-2:2017 and developed entirely by the ISO committee (TC171/SC2/WG8) without Adobe as the primary author.

What is the PDF Association (PDFA)?

The PDF Association (pdfa.org) is an international industry association founded in 2006 to promote and support the use of open PDF standards. It hosts the PDF Days events, publishes technical resources (including the Matterhorn Protocol for PDF/UA), produces best practice guides, and represents PDF implementors in ISO standards development. Membership includes software vendors, enterprises, government bodies, and standards organisations. The PDF Association operates the PDF Competence Center and manages the PDF/A Competence Center.

What are the main limitations of PDF/A-1 compared to PDF/A-2?

PDF/A-1 (based on PDF 1.4) prohibits: transparency (all transparent objects must be flattened), JPEG2000 compression, optional content groups (layers), embedded non-PDF-A attachments, and digital signatures with LTV. PDF/A-2 (based on PDF 1.7) removes all these restrictions except the prohibition on audio/video media, JavaScript, and encryption. For most enterprise workflows, the most impactful addition in PDF/A-2 is transparency support — eliminating the complex and quality-degrading flattening step required for InDesign, Illustrator, and similar tools.

What is veraPDF and when was it released?

veraPDF is an open-source, purpose-built PDF/A validator developed by the Open Preservation Foundation and PDF Association, with funding from the European Commission's PREFORMA project. It was released in version 1.0 in October 2017, providing the first authoritative open-source PDF/A validator covering all conformance levels (PDF/A-1, -2, -3) and conformance levels (a, b, u). veraPDF has since become the reference validator used by national archives, library organisations, and digital preservation programmes worldwide.

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The PDF tools and standards discussed at this event are available free — no account needed.

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