Introduction
The digital print specification caters to the growing small format digital print segment and provides standardized guidelines for PDF file creation and quality control.
It is released under the umbrella of the Ghent Workgroup’s 2015 specifications, as it builds on the same principles. The specification describes the rules PDF files used for digital print should follow and has already been adopted by leading preflight vendors to enable rapid acceptance in today’s workflows.
Due to the nature of digital print, the specification is significantly different from what is used in other segments such as offset printing or packaging. Rules focusing on overprint problems for example, have been significantly relaxed because the output devices in this market can handle those problems natively. The specification also sees relaxed image resolution checks, due to the nature of the work often printed in digital. Other requirements remain of paramount importance. These include PDF/X-4 compliance, basic PDF file integrity verification, ensuring overprinting white objects don’t disappear, all the way up to avoiding color shifts when using the wrong transparency blending color space. And of course, companies can always add additional requirements on top of what the Ghent Workgroup already suggests, but now there is a good set of base rules to build on.
