Bye Bye PDF: Why and How We Should Free Ourselves From It

PDF—Portable Document Format—documents are widespread, universally popular and well known. We use them almost every day for a variety of applications. As a digital imitation of the >2000-year-old medium of paper, they were once celebrated as a revolution. PDFs allow documents to be exchanged and displayed in a standardized way across platforms. Today—in a mobile-first world—they are more and more a curse than a blessing. In an increasingly interconnected, dynamic and data-driven environment, PDFs are reaching their limits. PDFs are becoming a digital dead end: they are static, inflexible, difficult to edit, bad for data extraction and therefore an obstacle to true digital collaboration.

It is time to rethink and distance ourselves from the ubiquity of PDFs. We should use more modern, flexible alternatives. Why? To increase efficiency, make better use of data and create future-proof processes.

Here are our five solution approaches to freeing ourselves from the shackles of PDFs.

1st
Web technologies as a flexible alternative

Why squeeze content into a rigid, page-based document format when web technologies offer us much more dynamic possibilities? HTML, CSS and JavaScript enable the creation of content that can be read in a browser on any device and even adapts to any screen size (responsive design). Web-based content is also more accessible. Instead of sending a large PDF file by email, we could simply share a link to the content. It is easier for us to control who has access to the content. The content can be displayed optimally, is always up to date, much more interactive and easily accessible. Forms, reports, information material and much more can often be realized better and more user-friendly as web content rather than as a static PDF.

2nd
Extract and index data instead of locking it up

One of the biggest challenges with PDFs is that the data they contain is integrated and “trapped” within them. Information is an integral part of the visual layout and cannot easily be read by machines or accessed in a structured way. Extracting data from PDFs in an automated way is often error-prone and tedious. Alternatively, information should be stored and saved in structured formats right from the start – for example in databases or as JSON. If a visual representation is needed, it can be generated dynamically from the structured data (e.g. as an HTML page or, if need be, on-the-fly as a PDF). This means that the data is accessible, indexable, searchable and ready for analysis or further processing in other systems from the outset. Fortunately, if the data is still in PDFs, there are technologies and approaches available today to extract, index and make it searchable – for example, OCR, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and large language models (LLM).

3rd
APIs and open interfaces for data exchange

Sending PDFs by email is a prime example of inefficient data exchange. It results in unnecessary copies, the risk of version chaos and often the information contained in the document is manually transferred to other systems. Instead, modern IT architectures are based on APIs (application programming interfaces). For example: Instead of sending a PDF with patient data, the general practitioner's practice system communicates directly with the hospital's clinical information system via an API. Instead of periodically collecting sales figures from branches in PDF reports, a dashboard could obtain the relevant key figures via APIs and display them in real time. APIs enable a direct, automated and error-free data flow between different applications and services—without detours via static documents and manual, human interfaces.

4th
Contemporary electronic signatures

Legally valid electronic signature solutions (EES, FES, QES) do exist, but why do they have to be based almost exclusively on a PDF? Tying a signature to a static PDF is often just a digital imitation of the analog process. More advanced approaches would sign formats such as Markdown, JSON (e.g. with JSON Web Signatures) or HTML documents. The cryptographic procedure could be similar to record the identity of the signer and prevent subsequent modification of the content. From a technical point of view, electronic signatures and consents without PDFs are easy to implement and the resulting audit trail would be more reliable than a handwritten signature anyway. The main obstacles to widespread adoption are legal acceptance and dissemination. Electronic signatures without PDFs would increase flexibility, user-friendliness and ease of integration into existing applications.

5th
Blockchain or an end to “I need my own copy”

The “everyone has their own copy” problem is ubiquitous with PDFs (“Vertrag_final_v2_korrigiert_signed.pdf”). This leads to confusion, version conflicts and trust issues. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) offer a fundamentally different approach. Instead of distributing copies of a document, a common, persistent and trusted data set (ledger) is created, which can be accessed by all authorized parties. All changes and additions are transparently traceable and stored decentrally. Whether contracts, confirmations or proof of ownership, the blockchain can serve as a “single source of truth”. Nobody needs “their own copy” anymore because everyone has access to the same, verified version of the information and its authenticity is guaranteed. This eliminates redundancy and creates trust without the need for a central instance or authority.

conclusion
A more dynamic and seamless future

PDFs had their time, still have their place and certainly won't disappear overnight. They may still make sense for archiving or printing. But in our daily digital workflows, they should be critically questioned. Web technologies, structured data, APIs, modern solutions for electronic signatures and blockchain technology offer us powerful tools to work more efficiently, flexibly and in a more data-oriented way. So let's say goodbye to digital dead ends and create a future in which information flows seamlessly instead of being trapped in static documents.