After two years of remote sessions, the PDF Days are back for a hybrid event with a technical workshop and a conference that is also live-streamed from Berlin.

This year the PDF conference is preceded by a Deep Technical Workshop led by the PDF Association CTO Peter Wyatt.
The event is intended for developers and will focus on best practices for specification implementation.

Deep Technical Workshop agenda

PDF Days conference

Keynotes

Each day of the conference will start with a keynote.

The future: re-imagining the best possible definition of PDF

On Monday 12th, Peter Wyatt, PDF Association CTO, will talk about the future of PDF and how the specification should evolve to serve all its stakeholders.

Is Digital Transformation the end of PDF?

On Tuesday, Kenny Swope from Boeing will tell us how his company uses PDF and its role relative to Boeing’s digital transformation.

After the keynotes, attendees can attend the sessions from different tracks. This year, three tracks are available.

Experience track

In this track, attendees will find sessions about PDF users’ experiences, good and bad, and what needs to be done to make the format better for everyone.

Implementation track

Sessions from this track focus on best practices for PDF implementation according to the various specifications. This year, you will learn more about tagging, printing, scanning, and more.

Core Technology track

Aimed at PDF developers, this track will cover topics related to deep technical presentations about optimization, compression, tagging, signatures, forms, and more.

Now let’s have a look at what we’re going to present at PDF Days.

Facing a pandemic: hit and miss of PDF, how could we have done better?

September 12, 2022
11:45

Elodie Tellier

France had one of the most restrictive laws during the pandemic. Long before vaccine passports were available, people had to fill out, sign, and carry certificates when they left their homes. In addition, while PDF was the electronic file format available by default, the government was using a basic, outdated version of it. The experience has gradually improved over time, but people often had to navigate between paper and electronic documents before QR codes and apps. This presentation will look at how different countries have used PDF during the pandemic. We’ll see how the combination of a better understanding of the PDF features and easy-to-use solutions for all devices accelerated digital transition.

Smart Legal Contracts and PDF

September 14, 2022
09:45

Neil Pitman

Smarter contracts and blockchain technologies are already transforming business processes across commercial, legal and financial sectors and yet “We still approach contracts in much the same way as we have done for centuries. Decades old software such as PDF and Microsoft Word is used to create and store agreements in a digital format, but they are basically digital copies of paper documents. This fails to take advantage of technology that allows for dynamic data access and streamlined contracting.” (Source: UK Lawtech)

This session will explore the new technologies that are transforming legal contracts and discuss what the PDF community should do to ensure that the format has a future in this new era:

  • What are Smart Legal Contracts?
  • Crypto-assets and Cryptocurrencies
  • Distributed Ledger Technologies
    • Blockchain
    • Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
    • Interplanetary File System (IPFS)
    • Smart Contracts
  • Contrasting “Smart Contracts” and “Smart Legal Contracts”
    • Data Models for Contracts
    • Machine Readable, Data Rich and Collaborative
    • In-browser visualization
  • Case Studies
    • Contract Automation and Management
    • Electronic Trade Documents
  • Digital Representation and Ownership of Physical Assets
    • The future of PDF and Smart Legal Contracts
    • PDF Myths and Capabilities
    • Opportunities for the PDF Community

How document understanding can leverage your PDF workflow

September 14, 2022
09:45

Elodie Tellier

Matus Pizur

Document understanding is a constantly addressed topic and has become on top of the scene these last years with Deep Learning and NLP evolution. The PDF format is by nature unstructured, which implies sophisticated processes to extract and qualify information from such documents.

In this presentation, we will discuss four ways to address challenges brought by PDF (which are: layout & text understanding, hierarchy & relationships between the different structures):

  • Layout analysis,
  • OCR,
  • Textual content key-value association,
  • Natural language processing.

We will then discuss the many fields of applications of such technologies, including OCR, automatic indexing, tagging & labeling, structured layout conversion, and automatic redaction.

Sponsors

As event sponsors, we will also participate in the elevator pitches on Tuesday morning, after the keynote.

You can meet us at our booth during the breaks, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have. We’ll also have a few prizes to win 🙂

The recordings of the sessions will be available for those who couldn’t make it in person or to the live-streamed event. We will share them once they are available!

See you there!

Elodie