The development and adoption of international software standards for digital publishing will lead to greater efficiency and interoperability, experts say at Seybold.CHICAGO—A new wave of international software standards for digital publishing is emerging, industry insiders said Monday at the
Seybold Digital Publishing Workflow & Asset Management Conference.
While the new standards promise gains in variable data printing, content reuse and workflows, the industry is still mostly waiting to embrace these standards.
At the keynote address here, speakers said this "transitional period" is similar to that of the early 1980s, when turnkey publishing systems battled with systems based on personal computers.
"Never before have I seen so many developments at once [in publishing and production technology and software]," said consultant Ron Roszkiewicz, an advisory board member for the Seybold Report.
"What we're getting to is a computer-integrated manufacturing environment for publishers and printers."
During the early 1980s, standards like Adobe Systems Inc.'s PostScript were the first wave of specifications for the digital imaging industry.
At first, standards were pushed by private companies, but then consensus began to build through organizations like the ISO (International Standards Organization) and ANSI (American National Standards Institute), he said.
QuarkXPress 7 is expected to demo at Seybold. Read more here.
"PostScript was one private company standard that stuck," Roszkiewicz said. "The first consensus activity for the publishing industry was TIFF in the 1980s."
Today, standards such as JDF (Job Definition Format) are maturing, as well as PPML (Personalized Print Mark-Up Language), which is based on XML. These standards are enabling publishers to more efficiently manage their production processes, now all digital.
"Every aspect of production workflow is digital—from photography through prepress through print," said Mary Lee Schneider, president of Premedia Technology Solutions, a business group of RR Donnelley & Sons Co.
Schneider said the industry is moving toward a different work production process, and that the roles of the customer and the vendor may well change in the future.
However, Martin Bailey, a senior technical consultant at Global Graphics Software Ltd., developer of the Harlequin RIP, said it has been hard to quantify the productivity gains from workflow standards like JDF.
Click here to read more about the advantages of the PPML standard and why adoption is lagging.
Bailey also leads CIP4 (the International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress Organization), an industry project that promotes the JDF standard.
He said a journal recently reported that "no one" was using JDF yet, but that this was an oversimplification. "It has been hard to get users to describe the gains they have had because of JDF," Bailey said. "We have been trying to get some user stories together."
At the same time, some of the early adopter stories that CIP4 has assembled are quite telling. Printers investing from $50,000 to $1.5 million in technologies that utilize the JDF standard have reported that they have earned their money back through productivity gains in 12 to 20 months, Bailey said.
In addition, throughput for some users of JDF-savvy software has increased by 40 percent, he said. What's more, supervisor time spent managing print projects has dropped by 50 percent and operator downtime has been reduced by 95 percent for some adopters, Bailey said.
Meanwhile, press running hours are increasing by 10 to 20 percent with the JDF support, Bailey continued. This productivity improvement let some publishers reduce staffing costs, yet still provide better customer service than before.
"If you can look at one screen and tell the status of a print job, and not have to walk around the plant, and get back to the customer in an hour, that is improved customer service," Bailey said.
There are close to 200 products from 60 vendors using the JDF standard today—including Adobe Acrobat.
"JDF is included in Acrobat," Roszkiewicz said. "It's not hidden away in menus, it's right out front. That [support] influences the choices that one makes for production."
Next Page: More improvements to come.
There will be even more improvements in productivity and workflow management in the coming years, said Paul Jones, the technical director of PODI (the Print On Demand Initiative), an international consortium of hardware and software vendors in the printing industry.
Jones said the consortium is working toward completing a PPML-based standard that will enable full-color, variable-data print jobs to be completed at "a high speed."
PPML is generally used for version control and resource management. The forthcoming test suite of software using the PPML-based standard will enable files composed in PDF, TIFF and JPEG to be printed in one job.
"We've been very busy," Jones said. "This will soon be released."
The consortium is also working on a digital print ticket for specifying JDF job tickets, he said.
Some standards developed during the early stage of the digital print industry are no longer used in the United States, but are still employed overseas.
"TIFF is not used in this country much any more, but it is used in Japan and the Far East," said David McDowell, one of the players in the development of digital imaging standards during his 40-plus year career at Kodak, and now a consultant. This is for a practical reason having to do with the printing of words for other languages. "They don't have the fonts," McDowell said.
An industry task force is meeting later this month in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to work on the next phase of Adobe PDF/X. A goal of the committee is to make sure that PDF/X-based software allows files with several categories of fonts to be read.
"Standards development is a completely voluntary process," McDowell said, asking for industry insiders to step up and join the effort. "We need the best minds. We need to get a whole spectrum of opinion—not just printers."
Without the perfection of these workflow standards, industry goals for improved digital workflow will never be realized, according to Diane Kennedy, vice president of publishing technology at IdeAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance), a nonprofit group focused on end users in the publishing business.
The new digital photography workflows bring their own requirements for standards, Kennedy said, pointing to magazines that now embrace a "raw workflow" from photographers, which place images directly into production processes.
"They're also managing photo assignments from assignment through production, archiving and reuse," she said, adding a prediction that this will improve sales for stock photo agencies.
Another project that may be vital in the coming years is the ADSML standard, a cross-media copy flow enhancement specification for creative content in advertising and other workflows. The plan is to enable producers of copy for, say, the online environment, to use their content files and easily repurpose them for print production or use in another medium, Kennedy said.
Support for standards should improve workflows and the variety of software available in the market. "Open standards will bring interoperability," Roszkiewicz said.
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