PDF Days Keynotes Announced!
This year’s keynote addresses at PDF Days will be delivered by PDF Association CTO Peter Wyatt and Boeing’s Kenny Swope.
PDF Days Europe 2022 is coming this September, and it's less than 6 weeks away!
This year's event features two keynote speakers, each with a major story to tell.
Keynote for Monday September 12
First up, on Monday, September 12 is PDF Association CTO Peter Wyatt, whose presentation is entitled: "The future: re-imagining the best possible definition of PDF". Peter describes his upcoming speech as follows:
The PDF specification is critical to the PDF technology ecosystem and its stakeholders. “The spec” is the “law” that defines what a valid PDF file must be. While PDF does not have a reference implementation, the common practice of relying on reverse-engineering the work of others, or examining PDFs "from the wild" tends to lead to even more variously malformed PDF files and differing implementations. For this reason, then, the goal of the PDF specification is to always be clear, precise, unambiguous, error-free, easy to navigate, and easy to understand for all its many readers.
Since PDF 1.0 was originally published in 1993 the format has been defined by a large volume of technical descriptive text published in the style of a monolithic book. At 1,000 pages the current PDF 2.0 specification is not only large, it’s also difficult to navigate, and challenging to locate all information about a specific feature. Worse, related information is often disjointed, dispersed or even contradicted throughout the document. The problem extends beyond PDF’s own specification when one considers the other 89 other referenced documents and standards needed to correctly implement PDF. Even the most ardent and experienced PDF developer can find themselves quickly frustrated and feeling unsupported. As PDF is widely adopted across numerous global industries, the readership of the PDF specification is now also far broader than was ever likely imagined.
It’s time to start asking - and answering - some questions:
- How should a file format specification for a technology as important as PDF be best documented and presented for future developers and other readers?
- How can the specification be made more agile, with improved clarity, correctness and enabling a holistic awareness and understanding of all technical topics?
- How can we make the specification easier and faster to consume, and understandable by all PDF stakeholders?
A 1,000-page tome of finely-crafted English sentences constructed to meet the onerous requirements of formal standards language, formatting, and other legacies will never be the easiest, clearest, most unambiguous, and error-free description for a complex evolving technology. We can do better. We must do better if PDF is to remain reliable, portable, and relevant - and thus grow into the future for all its stakeholders. And now, we have that chance…
In addition to his keynote Peter will lead the Deep Technical Workshop on September 8-9, immediately, before the main event!
Keynote for Tuesday September 13
On Tuesday, September 13 the Keynote presentation will be PDF Association Board member Kenny Swope of Boeing, who will be asking the question "Is Digital Transformation the end of PDF?" Kenny describes his upcoming address as follows:
The concept of a digital document in PDF format has been around since the first versions of Adobe’s product in the 1990’s. Since its publication as an open standard in 2008, the format has become ubiquitous to documents worldwide and is often referred to as the “digital paper” of our time. One finds its use in every industry, every sector, and all manner of business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to consumer transactions. It is truly one of the success stories of digitization in the modern world.
Digitalization, on the other hand, speaks to a complete refactoring of how to think about data. Brought on by IoT, service-oriented architectures, and always-on internet access, the industry, government, and consumer sectors are all rethinking their relationship to information and how it is authored, exchanged, revised, and archived. At Boeing, the company is fully engaged in a digital transformation that seeks to redefine how aerospace products are defined, developed, produced, and serviced. We will examine PDF use in Boeing and share thoughts on its role relative to digital transformation.
Join Peter, Kenny and the rest of the PDF technology community at PDF Days Europe 2022 in Berlin this September!
