The PDF Association has established a new working group. The "PDF Reuse Technical Working Group (TWG)" is dedicated to the research of new technologies and processes that enable reliable reuse of document content and semantics on different devices and a wide range of applications. The board of directors has appointed Matthew Hardy, senior engineering manager, document cloud at Adobe, as its first chairman.
One reason for this is the expectation of users that they can view PDF documents on different screens without loss of quality. On the other hand, search engines, text-to-speech solutions, translation engines, 3-D and video applications and similar applications should be able to reliably extract and evaluate the content of PDFs.
"The primary goal of our new working group is to enable reliable reuse of PDF content in HTML," says Matthew Hardy, adding: "The knowledge gained will help us to improve our algorithm for deriving HTML from PDF and to use it in other projects of the ResponsivePDF TWG.
Since accessibility plays an important role in the reuse of PDF, the further development of the specification for well-tagged PDF will be a first key project of the new working group. Members of the PDF Association are invited to participate in the new initiative, the results of which could possibly be published as a new subset standard to ISO 32000-2 (PDF 2.0).
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