A new publication written by me has been published in today’s c’t 3/2026.1 It shows step-by-step how data from PDF forms can be automatically extracted using the open source tool pdfcpu and subsequently imported back into ERP or ticket systems using jq or curl. Completely without media breaks, proprietary software or subscriptions. Read more

The Portable Document Format (PDF)1 is a great example of how an originally brilliant concept for displaying print documents has been ruined over decades. Initially conceived as successor to PostScript,2 it has degenerated into a universal container format. Text, images, vectors, scripts, fonts, form data, even complete 3D models there’s hardly anything, that can’t end up in a PDF, including Doom. Read more