Our software isn’t always easy. It can’t be, as it’s designed to solve real problems and, as such, needs to be flexible and powerful. This means it can feel unapologetically complex.

There’s a lot of documentation for it, though. There are many YouTube videos for it. Yet, it’s still easy to struggle with finding out how exactly to get this task done that you’ve been asked to do.

Why is that? What is missing?

What we learned from pdfCamp

Many years ago, callas decided to start organizing pdfCamp events. We explicitly styled those after “hackathon” events. Not training where someone stands at the front and lectures, but real-time collaboration events where people from our industry (you!) and callas team members work together to solve real-world production problems.

That is not always easy – especially not if you’re the person in the front of the room, who has the mouse, and works their way through the suggestions from the room. I know, I’ve been that person many times.

It’s also exhilarating and very educational, and even as a PDF expert with 15 years of experience with the callas products, there isn’t a single pdfCamp where I don’t learn new tricks.

(by the way, if this sounds interesting, feel free to check out the next pdfCamp. The event is currently fully booked, but you can join the waitlist and will be notified if a spot becomes available.)

Why does this work?

pdfCamp works because it’s not about the end result. It’s about the journey.

It shows that there is no single right answer to questions about PDF and about the callas products; there are multiple solutions that have different strenghts and weaknesses.

And it allows failure. It makes it clear that even the experts sometimes have to take a step back and try a different road to find a solution.

What it does that the documentation and our feature movies don’t do, is showing the process. Real problems don’t come with a “use this pdfToolbox feature” label, and they often need a mix of different features.

Yes, it’s interesting to understand what individual features exist in the product, and what they can do for you. But it’s even more interesting to understand how they can cooperate, and to see the process you can go through to connect them together.

pdfToolbox magic

Last year I posted two video series on LinkedIn. I used the phrase “Human Intelligence with pdfToolbox” (because it was funny, and true ). We now internally refer to those videos as “Magic videos”.

Both of these videos followed the same theme: a problem description for a real production question was followed by some examination of how it could be solved, and then the process of seeing it solved in real-time. No edits, no trickery, just … let me work through this problem and try to find a solution.

You can see both of these video series on YouTube now, we merged them into two single videos for you to make it easier:

pdfMagic

After doing feature videos for a whole year, I gave myself the challenge to create a few more of these pdfMagic videos in 2026.

I’ll admit that part of the reason is that they are challenging for me (and thus fun). But I promise the real reason I’m doing these is that I think it will make the product more accessible.

I would hope you agree?

If you have topics that you’d like to see tackled in this way, don’t hesitate to reach out!