Since web browsers took over mainstream PDF viewing several years ago, high-quality support for Tagged PDF in web browsers has always been a key objective for advocates of accessible documents.

Google’s announcement is proof that not only is the web continuing to move in the direction of accessibility, but web technology companies are recognizing that support for PDF is key to modern web browsing.

PDF Association member CommonLook worked with Google on this development and is quoted in Google’s post.

In discussing this work with the PDF Association, CommonLook’s Co-CEO and Director of Development Ferass Elrayes, who has participated in the development of PDF/UA since 2004, said:

“CommonLook provided technical and standards-related advice to the Google team working on the project. There are obvious challenges and still more to be done as the quality of the tagging is highly dependent on the underlying HTML. But clearly this is a major step forward and we continue to work with Google to provide guidance as they progressively improve the tagging.”

I’d met with the Chrome team in August, 2018 to discuss Tagged PDF and encourage its adoption. Following the announcement I reached out to Google’s Dominic Mazzoni, who led the effort. He said:

“This change will benefit end-users directly when they want to generate an accessible PDF, but also indirectly, as content creators who use an HTML-based workflow to produce PDFs now have another option to use that generates tagged PDFs.”

The Chrome team has posted some quick tips on how to use Chrome from the command-line to transform a document directly into a PDF.

Invented in 1993 as a page description format, PDF’s unique set of capabilities continues to deliver unmatched value to users worldwide. As browsers continue to improve their support for PDF we expect users to see the benefits of  not only accessible content in PDF files, but more powerful and reusable PDF documents in general.

The post Chrome adds support for Tagged PDF appeared first on PDF Association.

Co-chaired by Patrick Scouten (AbleDocs) and Paul Rayius (CommonLook), this Working Group’s activities will include:

• Providing a vendor-neutral discussion-place for matters of specific interest to service-providers
• Enhancing the common understanding of best practice in accessibility authoring and remediation
• Studying best-practice in business contexts (tagging for usability, tagging in sub-optimal contexts, limited access to authors, etc.)
• Perhaps some sort of “observatory” function to factually and neutrally monitor and report on viewer/AT software combinations

The WG’s first meeting will be held via GoToMeeting on September 1 at 11:00 ET for one hour.

Participation in the Accessibility Service Bureau Working Group is limited to PDF Association members and invited experts.

Members wishing to participate in this Working Group’s meetings should login to pdfa.org and select “Manage communities” to request access.

The post Announcing the Accessibility Service Bureau Working Group appeared first on PDF Association.

Global Graphics Software has licensed its Mako SDK to Racami, the authors of the Alchem-e customer communications management platform (CMM). Mako converts incoming documents into PDF and optimizes these files for onward processing through multiple delivery channels such as email, web viewing, bill payment, and printing.

Alchem-e is widely used by the insurance, financial, healthcare, book publishing, and marketing sectors to support the mass production and distribution of customer communications.  Corporate clients are often looking to reduce operating costs, comply with government regulations, speed up printing times, and automate processes.

One of the challenges in the industry is standardizing the multitude of data and print streams that are commonly used. This is important because the variety of file formats and the inconsistency in how they are constructed causes work to slow down or be of poor quality. Data preparation slows down, printers slow down, jobs are constrained to specific workflows and equipment. Normalization is key to solving this problem and companies use Alchem-e with the embedded Global Graphics Mako technology to speed up processing, reduce file sizes, and produce higher quality output.

Matt Mahoney, executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Racami comments, “As companies mature with multi-channel communications for marketing and transaction processing, they benefit from clean optimized PDF files. We are extremely happy with our choice to work with Global Graphics. We embed their Mako technology into Alchem-e and offer it as a stand-alone PDF preflight tool. Global Graphics is one of the best companies we’ve worked with because they are so responsive.”

“It’s exciting to work with Racami because they regularly bring us new challenges,” says Global Graphics Software’s Paul Hagen, VP of sales. “We investigate these straightaway and because we give our customers access to the product manager their requests are quickly translated into an item for our roadmap.

“Mako is multi-functional like a Swiss army knife. Racami started off using one of the blades to transform incoming files into robust PDFs.  We’re pleased to see them using other facets of this very capable technology with PDF optimization. It’s an interesting application of our technology and we sense that they have a growing market presence and great brand awareness.”

Ends

The post Mako adds value to Racami transactional workflow appeared first on PDF Association.

Collaboration
PDF is a universal file format that is compatible with most operating systems, can be viewed across multiple devices, and can be easily shared via email, through messaging services (i.e. Slack), or stored and shared in the cloud. This enables all of your coworkers to be able to open up and edit PDFs, allowing for easy collaboration.

When using the right tools, you can also convert other file formats (Word, HTML, images, etc.) to PDF, so if your coworkers send you files that need to be turned into PDF (or vice versa), there are several ways to do that. Check out our conversion tools such as FLIP2PDF, PDF Alchemist and PDF Converter to learn more about your PDF file conversion options.

Information Management 
Using PDFs to manage documents within your company is a great way to keep your information both accessible and secure for the long-term. For example, you can use PDF/A – a long-term archival PDF standard for the preservation of documents to prepare your documents for archiving as well as records management compliance. If you work in areas such as law firms, government agencies, or Local/State/Federal court systems, you already understand the importance of managing PDF/A-compliant documents.

Another way PDF can be used for information management and data sharing is using it to view important data in a more consistent, polished and presentable way (and if you have vast amounts of PDF files within which you would like to access that data in a more usable format such as HTML or XML, you can do that too). This can be especially useful when you want to extract, for example, a particular set of HTML data and turn it into a chart or table of information that is presented in a visually-appealing way. For more information about how data extraction to PDF works, check out our PDF Alchemist tool.

Security
There are many features of the PDF format that can help you keep information secure when sharing it digitally within your company or with external users, as compared to other file types. One such feature is redaction, which is the removal of sensitive/confidential/personal identifying information from a document. When implemented correctly, redaction will fully remove the sensitive information from your documents prior to sharing these documents with others or for documentation and storage purposes.

PDFs also offer digital signature capabilities which facilitates getting documents digitally signed in a secure manner without needing the signers to be physically present. This can help you complete deals and contracts or can assist with the completion of new employee hire paperwork virtually. Additionally, you can use encryption to password-protect your PDF documents so that people who aren’t meant to see the document cannot access them. These features provide extra layers of security that are vital when collaborating in a digital environment.

Are PDFs helping you get more work done remotely? Let us know about your experience by contacting us on our website.

The post 3 Benefits Of Using PDFs In The Digital Workplace from Datalogics appeared first on PDF Association.

New features:

• Expose image identification API in io module
• Add possibility to remove items from outline tree
• Initial support of linearGradient in SVG and in CSS

Of particular interest in this Core release is the initial support for <linearGradient> in SVG and linear-gradient() in CSS, which is something that both Core, and iText pdfHTML (3.0.1) will benefit from. SVG is an important topic for us, so be sure to check our future releases, as even wider support is coming.

Release pdf2Data 2.1.8

This release brings improvements for automatic table recognition, particularly in the case of borderless tables.

If you find pdf2Data useful for document data extraction, be sure to also check out iText pdfOCR.

Release pdfCalligraph 2.0.7

With the release of pdfCalligraph 2.0.7, we are bringing the support of Thai (the official language of Thailand), Khmer (the official language of Cambodia) and Lao (the official language of Laos) to a whole new level! Thanks to the ICU – International Components for Unicode project (and ICU4N!), we now support correct line breaks with these languages. Don’t forget that aside from iText 7 Core, iText pdfHTML also benefits from these changes.

Release pdfHTML 3.0.1

A new feature in this release is the introduction of support for <linearGradient> in SVG and linear-gradient() in CSS. For those of you who are interested, we’ve produced a code sample demonstrating different implementations of within our layout engine.

Besides this, we continue to improve our line-height property support that was added for pdfHTML 3.0.0 and added support for setting the background on HTML elements. Something that will continue to be improved (we’ll keep you posted!)

Release pdfOCR 1.0.1

We launched pdfOCR end of June and now we’re already releasing 1.0.1! We’ve made improvements to the way that the calculations for word bounding boxes are made, so that in languages where ligatures are required, we are able to properly detect the text and render each character correctly.

This change is especially for our pdfCalligraph customers, so that they can render advanced typography in their OCRed documents.

Release pdfXFA 2.0.7

In a nutshell, the flattening process supports a wider variety of scenarios. This is a bug fix only release, as no new features have been added.

RUPS

We always release RUPS together with iText 7 Core, as it is one of the most important dependencies it has (so all the goodies in Core, should make its way into RUPS). For this release in particular, we’ve also targeted and addressed the CVE-2020-10683 vulnerability. Happy debugging!

For full details on the improvements, bug fixes, and installation details, head over to the iText 7.1.12 Release notes on the iText Knowledge Base.

Still have questions?

If you are interested in learning more or have additional questions, contact us

If you are interested in learning more about the iText 7 suite, click here

Original Post: https://itextpdf.com/en/blog/technical-notes/itext-suite-7112-released

The post iText Suite 7.1.12 released appeared first on PDF Association.

They have developed their All-in Signing Service; a remote service for the legally binding electronic signing and timestamping of documents. By using the Signing Service, Swisscom’s business partners can offer their customers digital processes for document transactions. Numerous companies (especially from the banking sector) have already recognized this potential and integrated their remote signing service into their workflows to sign various types of PDF such as legal contracts, financial contracts, invoices etc.

The Signing Service was developed by making use of the long-standing digital signing capabilities of iText. Their solution has been using iText as the backbone of its PDF signing engine for over 5 years.

“We chose iText to power the PDF signing part of AIS due to its ease of use and flexibility. Thanks to its provision of an abstraction layer for PDF, it enables our customers to produce digitally signed PDFs without having to know about the PDF specifications.”

   Peter Amrhyn, CTO Trust Services: Swisscom

“Swisscom Trust Services is one of the leading trust services providers on the market. We place the highest demands on our solutions and therefore only select partners and suppliers that we are convinced complement us at the appropriate level. iText is such a partner.”

Marco Schmid, Head of International Expansion Strategy: Swisscom

Read the full case study here

The post Case Study: iText 7 Core – Integrating remote electronic signatures for Swisscom Trust Services appeared first on PDF Association.

Compart, North America, in partnership with PrimeEdge Technology, Inc., and Westwind Computer Products, Inc., was awarded the Department of Treasury, Internal Revenue Service Notice Conversion contract to deliver taxpayer notices as part the IRS IT Modernization Plan focused on making notices universally accessible to taxpayers via electronic communication channels and to ensure that the notices meet Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508 compliance.

Compart, North America will provide its DocBridge^® Mill Plus and DocBridge^® Toolkit solutions along with professional services to assist the IRS with installation, configuration, and implementation of this critically important initiative.

Said Brian Gasteier, CEO and President of Compart North America, “Communicating with customers the way they want to receive information is core to the solutions we provide at Compart. We are delighted to have been selected to provide our solutions to the IRS for this taxpayer notice conversion project. The fact that our software was specifically requested by name in the RFQ is a testament to the stability of DocBridge^® platform and our dedication to open standards.”

Compart, North America solutions enable customers to process, deliver, and access documents and content in any form and format and via any channel. The DocBridge^® platform as a flexible and secure solution offers the features of a modern input and output document processing and, in particular, bridges the gap between legacy systems and ever-increasing demand of modern channel-oriented customer communications. (www.compart.com)

PrimeEdge Technology, Inc., a woman-owned small business, provides high quality business equipment, managed print solutions, and managed IT solutions to help customers reduce unnecessary expenses and boost employee productivity. PrimeEdge, with its many years of technology experience, assists customers with document management solutions and contemporary business ideas to delivery bottom line results. (www.primeedgetech.com)

Westwind Computer Products, Inc., a veteran-owned business, is a dedicated provider of cutting-edge technology solutions tailored for government and enterprise business markets. With over 20 years of experience in taking a big-picture approach to provide the most appropriate IT and emerging technology solutions, Westwind partners with federal, state, and local agencies to meet their unique needs while ensuring a secure supply chain. (www.westwindcomputerproducts.com)

The post IRS Implements Compart’s DocBridge® Solutions to Communicate more effectively with Taxpayers appeared first on PDF Association.

Barcodes

It is now finally possible to generate two-dimensional and three-dimensional barcodes from input data contained in the JSON payload. The wizard consists of three steps to insert a scannable barcode into your template.

In the first step you simply select the type of barcode you would like to insert, in the second you bind the barcode to a field in the data collection, and in the third step you can configure the barcode in detail.

Barcodes behave like images and can be freely moved around or resized as required.

As of now, iText DITO supports barcodes in Code 128, Code 39, Codabar, EAN-8, EAN-13, Interleaved 2 of 5, MSI, Postnet, Planet, PDF 417, QR code and Data matrix formats. Of course, you can set type-specific configurations for all of these in the template designer.

Conditional Formatting of Alphanumeric Data Bindings

With this new release you can add text formatting to conditions, allowing you to style data bindings depending on their value. As an example, if you want to emphasize negative numbers (e.g. by printing them bold, red and underlined) iText DITO can do that for you.

That’s not all though. You can also swap fonts, increase or decrease the font size, character or word spacing, font color, font face and decorations depending on a condition, or even a series of conditions.

This feature is designed to enable conditional text formatting configurations to be saved as reusable styles. Below you can see an example of a style configured to print negative numbers in red.

This will result in something like the following:

More complex conditional styles can also be created. For example, different formatting can be applied if numbers are above or below a certain threshold.

Conditional styles are not limited to number-based conditions though. You can also define textual or Boolean-based style conditions for data bindings, useful for if you need to change content formatting based on a true or false condition, such as whether or not a payment has been made:

Text Formatting Preservation

The iText DITO Editor provides a wide range of text formatting capabilities at your disposal. However, sometimes data you pass to the PDF producer service may already contain formatting tags. For example, rich text fields in the user interfaces of your systems of record may store content with its layout in HTML format.

If you want to preserve this formatting, iText DITO 1.4 can now read a selection of HTML layout tags and styles and apply them. Supported tags in the first iteration of this feature are:

• <b>
• <i>
• <u>
• <strong>
• <span>

Supported styles are:

• font-family
• font-weight
• font-style
• font-size
• color

If a tag or style is unsupported, it will be replaced with an empty string, and all attributes except style will be ignored and removed from the tag.

To activate formatting preservation, simply tick the box in the data bind configuration. If you leave the box unticked, all tags will be considered as flat text, and printed.

Password Protection for Generated PDFs

In iText DITO 1.4 it is now possible to protect generated PDFs with a password configured at the API level.

You can set a user password which prompts users to fill out a password to open the document, an owner password which prompt users to fill out a password to interact with the document, or both, and set the appropriate protection levels through the newly added Encryption Properties of the PDF Producer operation.

The permission parameters you can configure are:

• Content copying;
• Editing;
• Printing;
• Screen reader access.

Other Improvements

iText DITO 1.4 also introduces a number of smaller improvements:

• Broadening of the pdfProductionResult operation to throw warnings for a variety of template-related issues, with such warnings shown in preview mode;
• Extended browser support for the iText DITO Editor: as of version 1.4 Microsoft Edge 79.0 and higher are supported;
• Support for Boolean values in both conditional content and conditional formatting wizards;
• Extension of the conditional formatting options with strike-through text decoration;
• Widow and orphan control through CSS.

As usual, for a detailed rundown of what’s new in the v. 1.4 release of iText DITO, you can download the Release Preview Guide or check out the Release Notes. However, we recommend that the best way to explore the new features and capabilities is to try them out yourself with a free 30-day online trial.

Still have questions?

If you are interested in learning more or have additional questions, contact us

If you are interested in learning more about iText DITO, click here

Original Post: https://itextpdf.com/en/blog/itext-news-technical-notes/itext-dito-14-now-available

The post iText DITO 1.4 is now available! appeared first on PDF Association.

When brands enrol in Transparency, they are issued with a series of Transparency codes – technically speaking unique, alphanumeric non-sequential codes (in CSV format). Brands are then responsible for sticking a Transparency code on every unit that they want to sell on any channel. Each unit gets its own unique code which is a 26-digit encryption code that includes the product’s ‘rich unit level information’ i.e. the manufacturing date, location, materials and ingredients. Each code can be tracked and traced back to a single brand, so – when sold through Amazon – it knows which code belongs to which brand. If a shipment of products that are enrolled in Transparency comes to the warehouse without such codes, the related seller will be investigated, then the inventory will be pulled down. Customers can download the Transparency app and then scan the code to verify authenticity, understand when the item was manufactured and more. The following screenshot is from the Transparency website and explains how customers can use it:

Brands can choose to individually sticker products if they like, but most of them are working with their in-house or third-party labelling or print and packaging partners instead to print bar codes directly onto their packaging, thereby avoiding any additional sticker costs and increasing efficiency. The initiative to use the Transparency service could also come from the packaging or labelling supplier.

Since these Transparency codes are individual to packaging, you can only use them in digital print. The printer could print the sticker with Transparency code after the packaging has been printed and paste the sticker on there, which could be manual or machine work, but much smarter is to integrate the code into the packaging design itself. When printing the 1000 copies of the packaging, you can have as many different Transparency bar codes applied at that time (Variable data printing). Of course, a bar code labelling solution is needed that can place the required elements of Transparency, like Transparency logo and description, Data matrix symbol and code and Product ID (such as UPC, GTIN, SKU or EAN). Such labelling solution can for example provide preconfigured label templates in accordance with the Transparency program. The brand owners will only have to provide their 26-digit transparency codes and Product IDs to the labelling solution provider, which they will convert to QR codes and print along with other required information (like transparency logo, Data matrix symbol …) most likely in an automated way.

Of course, individual print requires fast creation of individual data. Web technologies based on JavaScript and HTML are the fastest way to convert data into design. One of our products, pdfChip, provides a functionality to add bar codes that can be used by such print and packaging suppliers. Our business partner calibrate has achieved the feat of automating the entire process from receipt of order to approval and production for the end user etikett.de, a label printing website who recently launcheda Transparency label generator.

The post Regulate counterfeits with label printing appeared first on PDF Association.

MEMBERS: please note that the PDF Association has completely revamped its ISO documents portal to make it more convenient for you to identify standardization documents related to a topics that interest you. All ISO committee process and draft documents such as draft standards, comments and resolutions and meeting-minutes are accessed via the new members area on pdfa.org which replaces the separate intranet portal.

The virtual meetings in June were scheduled to (mostly) wrap up the work of the past years and to make advances on the next series of standards. This post summarizes the results. As above, PDF Association members and members of the US TAG for ISO TC 171 SC 2 will find links to minutes and other related documents in the PDF Association’s ISO documents portal.

PDF 2.0 – ISO 32000-2

Over the last three years PDF itself (ISO 32000-2) has received an update to address all issues identified since PDF 2.0 was published; in June the document was advanced to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) status. Members can review the last round of technical comments discussed and dispositioned in December, 2019; the comments handled in June will be posted shortly.

The work to incorporate all changes into the draft standard and perform necessary quality-control is straightforward, but substantial due to the size and complexity of the document. The ISO publication procedures (independent of the technical work in the committees) require several months, however at this point we believe that the dated revision will occur in 2020.

Here are the full meeting minutes from the June 2020 meeting.

PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/VT

All three standards received a few editorial comments and are now going into a 2 week committee internal review before they are sent to ISO for publication later in 2020. Members may access the current drafts for PDF/A-4, PDF/X-6, and PDF/VT-3.

Here are the full meeting minutes for PDF/A, PDF/X, and PDF/VT.

Future extensions to PDF 2.0

ISO TC 171 SC 2 WG8 discussed the formalized procedure required for future extensions to our standard. This document will now be published as a white-paper on the committee home page.

Stages in the creation of an ISO Standard

When an international standard is created it generally goes through the following stages:

• NWI: New Work Item
• WD: Working Draft
• CD: Committee Draft
• DIS: Draft International Standard
• FDIS: Final Draft International Standard

The document is progressively refined in each stage. At least one ballot is required in order to move from one stage to the next. For most, but not for all stages, several rounds with ballots may take place, for example, to address certain strategic questions. Additional rules apply that are particular to their respective stages, e.g. some stages have a maximum duration.

This video from ISO provides an overview about the various types of publications ISO produces and the development process for each. Further information from ISO can be found here.

The post ISO Liaison Update for July, 2020 appeared first on PDF Association.