Conference March 2009 📍 Berlin, Germany

PDF Days Europe 2009 — Berlin: PDF/A Momentum and the Path to ISO 32000

PDF Days Europe 2009, held in Berlin in March 2009, was the first PDF Days event following the publication of ISO 32000-1 in 2008. Sessions examined what ISO standardisation meant for European PDF deployment, growing PDF/A adoption in national archives, and early discussions of what would become PDF/A-2.

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Key takeaways

ISO 32000-1 publication (2008) removed the last procurement barrier to PDF in EU public sector contexts — now unambiguously an open standard.
Large-scale PDF/A-1 conversion projects were achieving 88–97% automated conversion rates, with transparency flattening as the primary exception cause.
PDF/A-2 transparency support was eagerly anticipated — confirmed in development at the event.
The iText AGPL licence change in 2009 disrupted many European enterprise Java PDF workflows.
Approximately 160 delegates — the largest PDF Days Europe to that point.

PDF Days Europe 2009, held in Berlin in March 2009, was the first major European PDF event following the July 2008 publication of ISO 32000-1 — the international standardisation of PDF 1.7. The timing gave the event a celebratory atmosphere: after years of PDF being a de facto open standard whose openness was guaranteed only by Adobe's policy decisions, it was now an unambiguous ISO standard with royalty-free patent licensing. For European national archives, banks, insurance firms, and government agencies that had been cautiously deploying PDF/A-1, ISO 32000-1 removed the last concern about long-term format stability. PDF was now in the same category as ODF, OOXML, and other ISO-standardised document formats. Approximately 160 delegates attended from across Europe and North America, making it the largest PDF Days Europe to that point.

ISO 32000-1: what it meant for European organisations

European public procurement rules (EU Directive 2004/18/EC, later superseded by 2014/24/EU) require the use of open standards in public sector IT procurement. Before ISO 32000-1, PDF occupied an ambiguous position — open-documented but not formally standardised. After July 2008, PDF was unambiguously an open standard, and PDF/A was an ISO standard (ISO 19005-1, 2005) built on an ISO foundation. Sessions at PDF Days Europe 2009 examined how this changed procurement justification. German public sector bodies could now reference ISO 32000-1 in their open standards compliance documentation. The Netherlands — which had already mandated PDF/A for certain government records under the NEN-ISO 19005-1 standard — was now operating on an even firmer legal basis. The UK Government was reviewing its guidance on open document formats in this period (the precursor to what would become the ODF mandate debate of 2014). For businesses operating across EU borders, ISO standardisation meant a single format (PDF) could confidently be used for document exchange with any EU public sector body without concerns about future proprietary restrictions.

PDF/A-1 five years on: production experience across Europe

PDF/A-1 had been published in 2005 and had been in production in some European organisations for nearly four years by early 2009. Sessions featured case studies from German, Dutch, Swiss, and Austrian organisations across insurance, banking, government, and legal document management. An insurance company case study presented statistics from a PDF/A migration project covering 45 million existing PDFs. Key findings: 88% converted without intervention; 9% required automated cleanup (removing JavaScript, embedding fonts, flattening transparency); 3% required manual review or alternative handling. The distinction between "conversion" (processing existing PDFs) and "native creation" (authoring PDF/A directly from source) was highlighted — native creation produced far higher conformance rates than post-hoc conversion. National archive presenters described their use of verifiable hash-based integrity validation alongside PDF/A — storing a SHA-256 hash of each archived PDF to detect later corruption, complementing PDF/A's visual reproducibility guarantee with a byte-level integrity check.

Looking ahead: PDF/A-2 and the transparency problem

By early 2009, the primary complaint from PDF/A-1 practitioners was the prohibition on transparency. Transparency had been a core feature of PDF 1.4 (2001), and by 2009 virtually all professional design software (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) routinely produced PDFs with transparent elements. Converting these to PDF/A-1 required flattening — a process that degraded visual quality, increased file complexity, and sometimes produced rendering artefacts. Sessions on PDF/A-2 (then in development, ISO ballot not yet started) confirmed that transparency would be supported. The release of PDF/A-2 was eagerly anticipated by the design, publishing, and marketing sectors that had been either excluded from PDF/A or accepting quality degradation. Early discussions also touched on PDF/A-3 — the possibility of attaching any file type — which interested the financial services sector as a path toward a single PDF that could carry both a human-readable statement and machine-readable data for automated processing. This discussion would mature into the ZUGFeRD concept, first publicly presented in detail at PDF Days Europe 2012.

Open-source tools: Ghostscript, iText, and the ecosystem in 2009

The open-source PDF tool ecosystem in early 2009 was growing but still had significant gaps compared to commercial tools. Ghostscript could produce PDF/A output but with limitations in complex transparency handling. iText (at version 2.x before the licence change to AGPL) was widely deployed in enterprise Java applications for PDF generation. PDFBox (Apache) was in its early versions, primarily oriented toward text extraction rather than generation. Sessions examined how European organisations were building PDF processing pipelines using these tools and where they supplemented open-source with commercial components. The licence change in iText from LGPL to AGPL in 2009 (affecting iText 5) was a significant event for organisations using iText commercially — it prompted either AGPL compliance (open-sourcing dependent applications) or migration to a commercial iText licence or alternative libraries. The absence of an open-source PDF/A validator was repeatedly cited as a gap — organisations had to rely on Acrobat Preflight (a commercial tool) to validate PDF/A conformance, creating a dependency that conflicted with open-standards procurement philosophies.

Frequently asked questions

What is ISO 32000-1 and how does it differ from the PDF 1.7 specification?

ISO 32000-1:2008 is the international standard encoding of the PDF 1.7 specification. Adobe submitted the PDF 1.7 specification to ISO and ISO published it as an international standard. The technical content is essentially the same — PDF 1.7 and ISO 32000-1 describe the same format. The difference is governance and licensing: ISO 32000-1 is maintained by an ISO committee (TC171/SC2/WG8), includes a royalty-free patent licence from Adobe, and can be referenced in public sector procurement as an "open standard" under EU and national procurement frameworks.

What is the AGPL licence and why did the iText licence change matter?

The AGPL (Affero General Public License) is an open-source licence that requires any software using AGPL-licensed libraries to also be released as open source — including web applications accessed over a network (which LGPL/GPL did not cover). iText 5 (released 2009) changed from LGPL to AGPL. Organisations using iText 2.x (LGPL) in commercial products could continue under LGPL; those upgrading to iText 5 had to either release their application as open source or purchase a commercial iText licence. This prompted many European enterprises to either buy commercial iText licences or migrate to alternatives like Apache PDFBox or commercial PDF generation APIs.

When was the first PDF Days Europe event held?

The first PDF Days Europe event was held in Berlin in 2007, shortly after the PDF Association (then the PDF/A Competence Center) began organising industry events around the emerging PDF/A standard. PDF Days Europe 2009 was the third annual event and the first held after ISO 32000-1 standardisation. The Berlin location has remained constant for PDF Days Europe — the city's strong public sector and archiving community makes it a natural home for European PDF standards events.

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