Ghent PDF Workgroup Brussels summit

The Ghent PDF Workgroup, the fast growing international organisation building best practices for publishing workflows, held its Quarterly summit in Brussels recently.

Members representing 50 associations, suppliers, printers, prepress organizations, ad agencies, and corporations met to report and further progress their work to advance PDF standards for easy creation, processing, and international, intra-company exchange of graphic arts files for numerous applications.

Highlights of the meeting included: - News that the newest versions of Enfocus PitStop, Agfa Apogee and DevZero Printsure are compliant with the most current GWG specification, which means that users of those solutions can be assured that their projects will conform to the most up-to-date PDF/X specifications.

As a result, their files can be reliably created and then exchanged among, and output by, graphic arts organizations around the world.

Packaging Specifications are testing very well and are due to be released in Q4.

Job Ticket subcommittee discussions on Proofing ticket.

New whitepaper entitled - 'Workflow requirements for PDF/X Plus documents conforming to the specifications of the Ghent PDF Workgroup' - is being written by the Process Control subcommittee.

There was progress on many fronts over two days, the group met together and also as subcommittees, each of which is tasked with forwarding best practices and standards to accommodate unique needs of different markets and applications.

There was also an overall 'specifications' subcommittee, responsible for updates and testing of the core GWG specification, the basis upon which application-specific specifications are built and tested by 'real world' sites for the GWG.

The packaging and process control subcommittees, in particular, are at project stages that are closest to being released to PDF users.

September and October Events and News Anticipated The Ghent PDF Workgroup expects to announce availability of new specifications and other deliverables in the Fall, and will also soon detail activities it plans to undertake at Graph Expo, scheduled for October 15-18 in Chicago.

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