[gettalong]

It seems that the news hasn't spread far yet but due to sponsorships by various big PDF related companies the ISO standard for PDF 2.0 is freely available, see https://www.pdfa-inc.org/product/iso-32000-2-pdf-2-0-bundle-...

While the PDF 1.7 spec from Adobe was always available, once it was turned into an ISO spec (ISO 32000-1:2008) it became paywalled. Due to an agreement with Adobe, the ISO version of the PDF 1.7 spec was made available free of charge. However, the further development of the PDF standard was done according to ISO rules and that meant paying for the standard... until the PDF association and a few companies stepped up and made the spec free again (also see https://www.pdfa.org/sponsored-standards/).