The Ghent Work Group, the body behind PDF and preflighting standards for print, has released a major upgrade to its specification, the first for seven years.
Since the last major revision, separate efforts have addressed different market segments to improve automation and predictability of digital workflows.
But this has had the effect of moving specifications for sign and display, packaging, and digital print away from the base specification and made it more difficult to evolve in a cohesive way.
There is therefore a streamlined specification format released as GWG 2022. The obvious change for most printers will be to reduce the number of false positives in preflight checks. This is when the application flags a deviation from the ideal PDF but which will not cause production problems. Software developers will welcome the way that the new version of the specification makes their lives easier says Ghent Workgroup executive director David van Driessche. He is also chief technology officer at Four Pees.
Some vendors had created their own ways to spot these ‘false positives’, for example problems with a page element that will be masked in the final output. This is included in the 2022 version with a set of rules so that the operators can work on those areas which will cause problems if left unattended.
There is support for process steps, a means to identify cut and fold marks in label and packaging workflows. GWG 2022 will parse the file to identify that the necessary Process Steps for that product are in place.
It is important to note that GWG 2022 is not about support for PDF 2.0 or PDF/X-6 standards which are not in use in print as “the hardware and software in our market isn’t ready for that yet”.
Changes that are part of the update include the elimination of a spot colour description for newspapers, allowance for soft masks in images, stronger rules for naming spot colours in a PDF file, changes to limitations on ink coverage to recognise the use of spot colours in packaging.
Overall GWG 2022 imposes stricter naming conventions for spot colours, for elements and actions to remove ambiguities that can cause problems in processing a file and to avoid clashes between sectors because similar wording has been used.
The definitions and standard are available as a free download from the Ghent Workgroup website.
