Blog

The Coming of PDF 2.0 – Part 2

By Artifex Engineering - Thursday, September 14, 2017

In our previous article on this topic, The Coming of PDF 2.0 – Part 1, we provided a summary of the new specification developed by the ISO Committee. As we noted, this has been a long time coming (nine years), and any developer or product manager needs to be on top of this evolution and how it will impact your products.

Here at Artifex, our team has been actively studying the new PDF specification with an eye on new features and possibly correcting existing code now that improved descriptions of features are available. We have three broad areas of focus as they relate to our products: PDF interpretation or reading (MuPDF and Ghostscript), content creation (Ghostscript pdfwrite) and interactive features (MuPDF).

PDF Interpretation

We have a firm grasp on the issues related to reading and rendering brought about by the new specifications. Our team is updating Ghostscript and have already committed several changes to the Ghostscript codebase (UTF-8 improvements, Page-level OutputIntents, Black point compensation, and Halftone origin). We expect to have much of this wrapped up in time for our upcoming fall Ghostscript release.

Content Creation

Our staff has been investigating content creation changes under PDF 2.0. Artifex will be on the lookout for popular content creation features and implement them as time permits.

Interactive Features

Our MuPDF team is hard at work carefully reviewing PDF 2.0 changes in annotations, digital signatures and other interactive features that may affect MuPDF mobile and desktop development.

One of our strengths is the rigorous, continuous testing we conduct to ensure Artifex products are maintaining the high-quality performance for which we are known. With the release 1 of the Quality Logic Functional Test Suite for PDF 2.0 in hand, we have already begun testing for compliance against these new industry standards.

This summarizes where we stand currently with regard to PDF 2.0 today. We will keep our community of customers and developers informed as other noteworthy developments come the fore. If there are PDF 2.0 features that are important to you, please let us know at support@artifex.com.