Meanwhile, Cindy Van Luyck was appointed as GWG marketing officer. With impressive industry experience, she is perfectly suited to guide the GWG marketing efforts. Currently, Van Luyck is marketing manager at Chili publish, a recent GWG member who implemented the latest specifications in their solution offering.

David Zwang, chairman of Ghent Workgroup, said, “We have done an amazing amount of work in the past 14 years, on a truly global basis. This includes PDF specifications for preflight, job tickets for ad delivery, soft proofing guidelines and recently a lot of packaging related projects.”

Zwang added that there has been tremendous change in the industry with digital technologies really starting to come together with more cohesive digital workflows. This is moving rapidly and requires a lot of standardization and streamlining to bring all pieces together in a way that make sense for print publishing and cross-media.

David van Driessche, executive director at GWG, added: “Our focus has shifted from PDF to a broader scope of interconnected workflows, with many more aspects coming into play now: new markets, job ticketing, meta data. It stretches over best practices for publishing and packaging workflows, with a strong strategic direction into digital. More than ever before it is important for all market players, vendors, users and associations, to communicate and get aligned.”

The Ghent Workgroup, formed in June 2002, is an international assembly of industry associations and suppliers from across Europe and the United States. The Ghent Workgroup’s objective is to establish and disseminate process specifications for best practices in graphic arts workflows.

Since its inception over ten years ago, the organization has consistently produced numerous process specifications for PDF exchange, as well as developing useful tools for automating processes and testing and establishing consistent PDFs for print and publishing – all available free at: www.gwg.org.