PDF Days Europe 2022

What is PDF Days Europe 2022?

The PDF Association is an international collaboration of organizations and individuals promoting open standards-based electronic document implementations using PDF technology. They have a yearly event which is called PDF Days where everyone is welcome to join. You can join the technical talks which are devoted to information for developers, integrators and others interested and the solution talks devoted to the users.

For 2022 the PDF Association is offering a hybrid event, in-person in Berlin at the Novotel Berlin Am Tiergarten, and live-streamed online.

When?

• 12 September until 13 September 2022

iText at PDF Days Europe 2022

Michaël Demey - Strategies for Testing PDF Files

A staple in the toolbox of the Software Engineer is a solid test suite. Unit tests, Integration tests, and System tests are just a selection out of the vocabulary used on a daily basis. As PDF developers we also have a responsibility to make sure that the PDF files we produce and consume are conforming to the specifications that we write and maintain. This seems like a given, but there is a lot more than meets the eye. PDF files are complex constructs that require a thorough knowledge of the standard and industry practices. There are many roads to test PDF files and in this talk we'll go through various options that you can use. This goes from the obvious, more simple ways of assessing PDF output to the more zany and wacky options that have you wondering "why?" at first, but have you experience an "aha"-moment.

Michaël Demey & Kevin Willems - The PDF Detectives

PDF is one of the most used document formats in the world! This is a fact we should all be proud of. But the downside of this is that PDF files in all their glory and elegance can also be buggy or poorly constructed. Either through malice or ignorance of the specification. This leads to a lot of frustration in the world, with both end users who experience horrible behavior when trying to view their favorite PDF files and also to PDF processors who bug out and crash when trying to process these buggy files.

Not to worry! Detectives Kevin and Michaël are on the case! The dynamic duo that loves to debug PDF files will hunt down bugs for you on stage!

If you've ever wondered how PDF developers look at PDF files, how they consume and debug them, then this is the talk for you!

Maksim Bezrukov - Putting a squeeze on your PDF

There are many ways and tools to make a PDF. However, sometimes the resulting document may take up significantly more disk space than you would expect based on its content. It therefore makes sense to try to reduce the size of such PDFs, while preserving the quality of your documents.

The goal of this talk is to provide an overview of the range of PDF compression and optimization techniques, and the impact they can have on documents. We will discuss the following topics:

• data and structure removal;
• compression and content stream optimization;
• image resources optimization;
• PDF font optimization.

Matthias Valvekens - Ideas for interoperable self-updating PDF documents

One criticism that is commonly levelled at PDF is that when looking at a PDF document, the user generally has no easy way of knowing whether the document they're looking at is current or not.

While this isn't an issue when browsing the web, it can be problematic for users viewing previously downloaded documents.

Technical documentation, regulatory guidance, academic preprints, ... These are only a few examples in which being a few versions behind can matter a great deal. Besides traditional versioning, one could also imagine PDF form data and annotations being propagated in similar ways.

There already exist proprietary solutions that accomplish some or all of these goals, but a truly universal solution would of course have to be standardized.
This got us thinking: what would an interoperable versioning & updating mechanism for PDF look like?

That already leads to a number of interesting questions:

• To what degree can we leverage existing technologies?
• What are the security implications?
• How do we reconcile this with the "PDF as a permanent record" paradigm?
• ...

Join our session to hear our thoughts on these topics and see some of these ideas in action.