PDF Adoption Doubles In Two Years

Research undertaken for Enfocus has revealed that adoption of PDF in the printing and related packaging industries has doubled in the last two years.

Research undertaken for Enfocus has revealed that adoption of PDF in the printing and related packaging industries has doubled in the last two years.

The company's on-line survey, which polled 21,000 customers and was carried out by independent research company Readex Research, has shown that the use of Enfocus's certified PDF has increased to 60 per cent, compared to 30 per cent two years ago.

The survey also identified 15 per cent of users that said they have standardised their operation on certified PDF, compared to just five per cent in 2003.

The survey also indicates that the Ghent PDF Workgroup, of which Enfocus is a founding member, has had a substantial effect on the adoption of PDF standards.

In the Netherlands and Belgium over 40 per cent of the sample audience has standardised operations on the PDF/X-based Ghent PDF Workgroup settings.

Nearly 80 per cent believe that has increased the reliability of their production process, whilst in France the adoption of, and satisfaction with, the standardisation efforts is also reported to be very high, the research revealed.

"Belgium, the Netherlands and France were the first countries in which the local industry associations took a very organised and communicative approach to implementing these standards.

The results show that this has been a worthwhile exercise.

We are now looking in to new opportunities to extend this success further into Europe and worldwide," said Tom Peire, director of marketing at Enfocus.

The survey also indicated a customer satisfaction rate of just over 78 per cent of all customers that think Enfocus's products are 'good-to excellent' value for the money, said the company.

The launch of Instant PDF 3, a PDF creation tool, has attained an 18 per cent satisfaction level increase compared to the previous survey in 2003, said Enfocus.

Tom Peire commented: "Key challenges faced by our industry include the need to make production workflows faster and more seamless, increase productivity, cut costs and avoid errors.

The need for standardisation is stronger than ever to achieve those goals, and it is obvious from survey the results that people are no longer reluctant to integrate standards in to their production processes." And he added: "With Instant PDF 3.6 now also InDesign CS2 compatible, Enfocus provides the easiest, most reliable way available for creative professionals to create flawless certified PDF files.

In many cases this is the first step in a more and more automated process.

We are happy to see that our customers appreciate the efforts we have put in to making this product more reliable and easier to use - it inspires us to continue to implement this improved usability within our other products." Certified PDF is complementary to the standardization work of the Ghent PDF Workgroup and other industry associations.

It extends the power of PDF by embedding the PDF Profile that was used to preflight the file, and also creates a detailed preflight report, and audit trail of all edits made to the PDF document.

Certified PDF technology is integrated in all Enfocus products, and it is increasingly becoming the major incentive to purchase Enfocus software packages, in the company's opinion.

Peire continued: "We are happy to see that our educational efforts concerning the need for process standardisation have paid off.

We are even more excited to note that certified PDF is adding significant value to that process." Enfocus's certified PDF is an automation-enabling technology used for quality control whilst managing a large volume of PDFs.

Certified PDFs are immediately identified and moved through production faster than non-certified PDF files, said the company.

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