Ghent Workgroup addresses small format digital print

The Ghent Workgroup, or GWG, which develops guidelines and specifications to help printers make better use of PDFs, has released a new specification to cater to the growing small format digital print segment. 

Elli Cloots, Vice Chair at the Ghent Workgroup and Senior Product Marketing Manager at EFI.

The new specification provides standardized guidelines for PDF file creation and quality control for the small format digital print segment. This market is similar to traditional commercial print, but the methodologies and equipment used are different enough to require specific guidelines. Thus, for example, rules focusing on overprint problems have been significantly relaxed because the output devices in this market can handle those problems natively. Equally, the checks on image resolution have been relaxed to better reflect the nature of the work that’s typically printed in digital.

However, the new specification retains other requirements such as PDF/X-4 compliance, basic PDF file integrity verification, ensuring overprinting white objects don’t disappear and avoiding color shifts when using the wrong transparency blending color space. Essentially the GWG specifications offer a good set of base rules to build on and companies can always add additional requirements on top of these.

Elli Cloots, Vice-Chair at the Ghent Workgroup and Senior Product Marketing Manager at EFI, explained: “In a recent Ghent Workgroup survey, digital print was identified as a key area missing good guidelines for the usage of PDF.” She added: “Having this new specification helps significantly to improve standardization, and thus the possibility for automation, in this growing segment.”

The digital print specification is released under the umbrella of the Ghent Workgroup’s 2015 specifications, as it builds on the same principles. The specification describes the rules that PDF files used for digital print should follow. Software and hardware vendors can then use the specification to finetune file creation and quality control in their workflows and output devices.

Anyone interested in this can download the specification and application settings built from it from the Ghent Workgroup website, free of charge.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Syndicate content

You can license the articles from Printing and Manufacturing Journal to reproduce in other publications. I generally charge around £150 per article but I’m open to discussing this for each title, particularly for publishers that want to use multiple stories. I can provide high res versions of images for print publications.

I’m used to working with overseas publishers and am registered for VAT with the UK’s HMRC tax authority but obviously won’t charge VAT to companies outside the UK. You can find further details and a licensing form from this page, or just contact me directly here.

Support this site

If you find the stories here useful then please consider making a donation to help fund Printing and Manufacturing Journal, either as a one-off or a repeat payment. Journalism is only really useful if it’s truly independent and this is the only such news source serving the print/ manufacturing sectors.

However, there are costs involved in travelling to cover events, as well as maintaining this site, not to mention the time that it takes to carry out research, check facts and interview people. So if you value this work, then please help to maintain it and keep it free to read.

Subscribe

Never miss a story – subscribe to Printing and Manufacturing Journal to receive an email notification every time an article is published here. It’s completely free of charge and you can cancel the subscription at any point without any hassle. There’s no need to provide any information other than an email address and subscribers details are not for sale so there’s no risk of any further marketing spam.

Related stories

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *