GWG celebrates 25 years of the PDF

The Ghent Workgroup is inviting the global printing, packaging and publishing community to join it in celebrating 25 years of the PDF.

"This is a milestone for GWG. Today we are working with our global members and partners to extend and create specifications for the future of PDF for wide-format, packaging and industrial print processes," said chairman of the group, David Zwang. “It took a lot of development and actual application use by many people before PDF achieved its current state as the standard file format for the delivery of data and instructions for high quality printing and packaging,” Zwang added. “The Ghent Workgroup continues its commitment to produce specifications and share best practices for PDF exchange. Its goal is to provide valuable tools and guidelines to automate and test processes in order to promote consistent output results.” At the Seybold Seminar in 1998, a white paper was presented - ‘PDF for prepress’. This explained the development of the first PDF/X standards required to achieve ISO certification. It also envisioned the definition of the PDF/X-Plus specifications as developed by the Ghent (PDF) Workgroup (GWG). The PDF/X-Plus specification added the missing technical quality criteria for major print processes and products. In addition to wide adoption throughout Europe, the GWG specifications were also used in Switzerland for the popular PDFX-ready settings and preflight profiles. Before the Ghent PDF Workgroup was started, Enfocus in Ghent was holding meetings with individual associations in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK and France to create settings for preflighting in prepress that would manage errors and streamline the file handling process. These associations wanted to share their findings with their members and Enfocus found themselves repeating the same preflight settings and requirements to each group. Enfocus took the initiative to invite all the associations to come together round the table so that the discussions represented all countries. This was the start of a workgroup in Ghent (where Enfocus is based) and they called it the Ghent PDF Workgroup.