Dispatch from Berlin
PDF Days Europe 2025 Begins
I am writing this from Berlin on the eve of PDF Days Europe 2025. After a stretch on the road, from the ARA conference in Bristol through Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany, I am back at the business end of my notebook and ready to catch the opening wave of sessions tomorrow morning.
For those of you who could not make the trip, think of this as the first in a running series of field reports. These are short dispatches from inside the conference halls, a way to stay connected to the big themes without the jet lag or badge lanyards.
What is on deck for Day One
The morning starts with Professor Dr. Philipp Hacker giving a keynote on AI and digital documents. His focus is European regulation, particularly the EU AI Act and its labeling requirements, but the stakes are global. Hacker promises examples ranging from automated classification to fraud detection to ingestion pipelines that go off the rails when semantics get lost. For anyone working in information governance, the subtext is clear: how do we sustain trust when documents are being created, read, and judged by machines as much as by people?
The big split at 11:30
1. PDF 2030: where is the format heading?
Speaker: Kevin De Vorsey
This session is for those who care about the long horizon. PDF has been around for more than thirty years, and while it has proven durable, it also carries old assumptions. Kevin will be asking hard questions about what the next version of PDF might look like. Do we keep adding subsets and profiles, or do we rethink the foundation? For archivists and records professionals, this matters because the design choices made today will shape preservation and interoperability tomorrow. Imagine explaining to future researchers why a 2027-era PDF cannot be reliably rendered, or worse, why important features were never standardized when we had the chance.
2. Modern Invisible Ink: hidden information in PDF
Speaker: Felix Wermelinger, PDF Tools AG
Think of this as a cautionary tale. Hidden layers, unredacted text under black boxes, metadata that leaks more than intended, and malicious payloads smuggled in all fall into the “invisible ink” of PDF. Felix will walk through examples and connect them to risks we know well: failed FOIA releases, compromised confidentiality, and AI models ingesting content that was supposed to be gone. For information governance, this is a reminder that digital trust is not only about what you see but also about what you do not.
3. Tagged PDF in the Wild: accessibility and extraction at scale
Speaker: Boris Doubrov, Dual Lab
This session is all about data. Boris and his team ran eight million PDFs through their systems to see how many were tagged for accessibility and how valid those structure trees were. They also compared table tags with AI-driven table recognition, highlighting where the technology helps and where it falls short. For those of us who care about making information usable, whether for screen readers, automated workflows, or data mining, this is the ground truth. It is one thing to know tagging is required; it is another to see how often it is actually implemented correctly in practice.
Each track represents a different layer of the same problem.
Future strategy (PDF 2030) shows where the standard is heading.
Risk management (Invisible Ink) highlights what happens when documents are not as clean as they appear.
Quality and accessibility (Tagged PDFs) asks whether practice on the ground matches policy on paper.
Why this matters for us
Some might think PDF Days is just a technical trade show. The reality is that the undercurrent here is deeply relevant. Authenticity, transparency, and long-term access are at stake. The design choices, the way hidden information is handled, and the policy overlay from AI regulation all shape how trustworthy our digital documentary record will be in ten or twenty years.
Looking ahead
Tomorrow’s lunch will spill into poster sessions, which are often the liveliest part of the day. That is when I hear candid talk about implementation headaches and see prototypes that never make it to the slides. I will report back on what resonates for the information governance community.
So here we go. Day One dispatch complete. Stay tuned, I will be sending more field notes from Berlin as the conference unfolds.