Printing and Publishing
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Future workflows technology PDF Print E-mail
Written by David Zwang, VC, Ghent PDF Workgroup & Principal Consultant, Zwang & Co   
Much has been said about the role of print in the future of publishing At the Ghent PDF Workgroup we believe that it is, and will be for a long time to come, a significant part of the publishing landscape.

Print is still one of the most important publishing distribution mediums and, as a result of the many changes in the publishing industry, prepress workflows will continue to evolve over the next 3–5 years to better reflect the changing demands and production requirements of the greater publishing process. In fact the historic prepress process as we have known it will continue to move from one that addresses print-centric processes to more of a pre-publishing process that focuses on the broader requirements of ‘better controlled’ content creation and content packaging.

Production requirements are changing

Cross-media publishing, or network publishing as it has also been called, which facilitates this need for multiple forms of content creation, packaging and distribution, had many technical impediments early on; however many of these issues have since been addressed, and many new tools and processes are now available to facilitate this increasing need.

Distributed, collaborative production has become a significant part of the publishing process. While many publishers still collect, package and prepare content for distribution in a single site, increasingly many of these tasks are distributed to specialists around the globe. The image capture and/or editing may occur in one place, the textual creation and editing may occur somewhere else, and the packaging will likely occur in a completely different place from the distribution.

The growth of the non-professional publisher is already having a significant impact on publishing demand and processes. Microsoft Office, which accounts for the vast majority of software that exists in the business environment, is increasingly used for local (to a desktop printer) and more widespread distribution (both commercial print and electronic). More important than the format and volume issues that result from this is the lower publishing production skill set of the operators.

There is also an increasing demand for targeted and interactive content distribution, which can be seen in the proliferation of specialty print magazines and catalogues both in print and online. We are even seeing more redirection of viewers from print to websites, websites to print, and even TV and radio to and from websites. So there needs to be a relatively easy way to manage this co-ordination of content.

Add to all of this the increased availability of alternative tools that support multi-dimensional media content creation and viewing becoming standard on all platforms and you have some interesting issues that require some interesting solutions.

Tools are changing to meet the challenge The good news is that most of the publishing software developers have broad-based plans that will support these requirements, and impressively they are starting to deliver some of these new tools.

Adobe’s vision is based on their Network Publishing model. Their official slogan is: “Making visually rich, personalized content reliably available anytime, anywhere, on any device”. They break up their view of the publishing process into three process groups: Create, Manage and Deliver. Currently, as part of their plan, they include support for: Web, print, video and wireless distribution mediums.

In their Create group, they include the extended Creative Suite, which now includes print, Web and video. It is further enhanced by the addition of the products and technologies from the Macromedia acquisition.

The Manage group includes eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP), their technology that embeds context information into the content files to better enable content management and reuse in a more automated form. All of their products, including Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, GoLive, Bridge etc., support XMP. XMP is an extensible technology that can also support standard XML and XSL tagging to ensure broad-based compatibility. XMP has also been gaining support from many other software and solution developers, so we can see it playing a significant role in the future.

In their Deliver group, they include their Acrobat viewer products, and Internet printing and Web technology.

Quark, the other big player in the professional publishing field, although historically relegated to publishing for print only, has been actively working on broadening their support for the other distribution requirements. Their new direction is simply that of “media-independent publishing”.

While their flagship product XPress has been historically used for print publishing, they have extended the features in XPress 6.5 and the soon to be released 7.0 to allow for XML-based meta tagging to allow the content’s contextual information to travel with the document for reuse in a variety of distribution mediums. Quark Content Management (CMS) is a content and asset management system that helps manage all the digital content. And the Quark Dynamic Document Server (QuarkDDS) facilitates collaborative publishing over the Web for both print and Web distribution.

Microsoft also has a vision; in fact they have many visions. Their offerings go well beyond their Office line of products to include content management, content distribution, and even content ownership and sale. To support their belief that content creation, collection, packaging and distribution are critical to all forms of publishing, they went so far as to include XML support as a core functionality in Word, Excel and Access, to mention just a few of their supported applications. For those would-be publishers who need more sophisticated tools than Word or PowerPoint, they offer Microsoft Publisher, a full-featured content packaging tool.

The issue of formats

While many of the applications and functions may seem rather familiar, currently there is an underlying disagreement regarding content context format and style description. Microsoft, along with some of the other software developers and standard organisations, are focusing on XML and XSL, while Adobe is promoting PDF along with the XMP tagging technology.

For background purposes, the biggest issue in this dispute is Adobe’s position that in a purely XML and XSL environment you aren’t ensured a fully accurate vision of the authors’ intent, while using PDF you can ensure it. The good news is that, while this disagreement was a big issue a few years ago, with the introduction of XMP along with its ability to accept XML tags, as well as the structured form of PDFv1.4 and up, it is becoming an almost moot point. You can now ensure the intent, if you want it, and also have the flexibility offered by XML and XSL output solutions.

PDF/X is the print-centric International Standard subset of PDF that has been created to facilitate reliable print workflows. There are two new versions PDF/X-4 and PDF/X-5 that will be released later this year. These new versions address the thorny issue of transparency and layers that have been nagging at print production professionals for a number of years.

However, the best solution to facilitate a wider and more reliable print workflow is a PDF/X-Plus workflow. At the lowest level, it can solve the biggest preflight problem that exists in a print workflow – that of missing components. Beyond that it also can address the issue of device independence, another of the historic print production problems. Utilising the many PDF/X-Plus creation and checking tools available from most of the graphic arts software vendors, along with the best practices and setting files from the Ghent PDF Workgroup, you are ensured a reliable workflow.

For office print issues, there may be some help on the way. Currently the best way to get good print output from Microsoft Office documents is to use Adobe Distiller to create a PDF, however many offices don’t have access to Distiller. With the release of Microsoft Office 12 later this year, there will be a “save as PDF” option included, so everyone can create PDF from Office documents. However, you will probably still need to run those PDFs through a good PDF checking and perhaps fixing application to ensure a reliable quality print output.

Globalisation and its effect on production requirements

One of the other factors that is becoming more important is the globalisation of business in general and print production in particular. This highlights the need for standards in production. Creating files with different PDF and colour settings for the same mediums (magazines, newspapers, commercial, packaging etc.), and in many cases without even fully understanding who is producing them, is inefficient, costly and usually leads to problems.

Efforts to create international consensus on standards and best practices are the answer to this problem. Groups like Ghent PDF Workgroup, Printing Across Borders, CIP4, the ISO and its individual country participants are working fast and hard to make it a reality.

Automating your workflow

In order to streamline workflows and reduce costs and cycle times, a variety of automation solutions are now available and more are being released. While the goal of many might be to create a ‘lights out’ or completely automated workflow, this is probably not realistic for many of the print publishing processes that exist. However, there are many processes and sub-processes that can be automated to gain significant benefits.

Impediments and new roles

While these evolving workflows are exciting, and seem to address many of the new market and production requirements, it will take a while for their use to reach critical mass. Primarily this is due to one important fact. Technology is usually very easy to acquire; getting people to adopt it and use it correctly is the real problem.

That having been said, the real impediment to these future workflows will be the ability for the users, both professional and non-professional, to learn enough to fully take advantage of the benefits. We have already seen that the companies that develop the technology are trying to shorten the slope of the learning curve, and reduce the need for manual intervention through the introduction of technological solutions. However, there is a real need to get training to keep up with both the changes as well as the influx of non-professional publishers.
 
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