The PDF Association, the non-profit industry trade-group for organizations specializing in PDF technology, today announced two PDF 2.0 interop workshops for 2017. Hosted by Global Graphics Software, these workshops will provide a way for PDF tool developers to validate their work against the new ISO 32000-2 (PDF 2.0) standard by working with vendors of other tools. These unique events are taking place May 2-3, 2017 in Cambridge, UK and June 12-13 in Boston, in the United States.

PDF Association interop workshops are intended to help achieve industry-wide consensus on the meaning and application of PDF technology standards by providing an environment that provides material value to every PDF developer, from creators to processors to viewers. PDF 2.0 includes many new features and numerous enhancements to existing features, and developers can use the interop workshops to test their understanding of these new capabilities.

Duff Johnson, executive director of the PDF Association and PDF 2.0’s ISO Project Leader said, “PDF 2.0 is designed to be largely backward compatible, but older processors won’t handle new features. It’s vital for PDF developers to be able to accommodate PDF 2.0 files when their customers begin to use the new features and to share these files with others.”

Martin Bailey, CTO for Global Graphics Software, and the primary UK expert on PDF committees agrees, adding, “There are many cases where PDF 2.0 support will be vital to customers, and thus, developers. Just one example: PDF 2.0’s new page-level output intents will be silently ignored by pre-PDF 2.0 software, leading to printed colour that may not be acceptable. Although printers may initially limit their customers to older files, they will eventually prefer to remove the risk by upgrading to products that support PDF 2.0 files.”

The PDF 2.0 interop workshops are free of charge and open to all PDF developers wishing to attend. Developers may sign up for the PDF 2.0 interop workshop in the UK by visiting https://www.pdfa.org/ pdf20-interop-uk. Developers may sign up for the PDF 2.0 interop workshop in the USA by visiting https://www.pdfa.org/ pdf20-interop-usa.

First established as the PDF/A Competence Center in 2006, today, the PDF Association is an international organization promoting awareness and adoption of open standards in digital document applications using PDF technology. The association facilitates education, networking and communication, and the sharing of expertise and experience with interested parties worldwide. The current membership includes over 100 enterprises and numerous individual subject-matter experts from more than 20 countries.

The management board includes industry leaders from Adlib Information Systems Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., callas software GmbH, Datalogics Inc., DocuSign Inc., Foxit Europe GmbH, intarsys consulting GmbH, levigo solutions GmbH, Nitro Software Inc. und Satz-Rechen-Zentrum (SRZ). The association’s chairman is Matt Kuznicki, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Datalogics Inc. The Executive Director is Duff Johnson, independent consultant and ISO Project Leader of ISO 32000 and ISO 14289.