PDF/X and Printing Industry

Taiwan's printing industry mainly focuses on regional service customers because the market is not large enough to reach an economic scale, and because the market is not small enough, flexibility is insufficient. In order to continue its strategy of anticipating the future and forging ahead once and for all, Consultant Huang Jianming believes that the printing industry needs to:
1. Expanded service, no expansion of investment;
2. Professional division of labor, saving investment and staffing;
3. Using a network to integrate factories and bring them closer to customers;
4. The cost plus margin is lower than the cost of competitors.
Therefore, standardized operations, high-use equipment, and investment after business needs will be necessary for the future printing industry.
The deputy general manager of Kaili International Huang Donghui believes that PDF/X is a standard operating format conforming to this market condition. In X/X in PDF/X, it means the meaning of exchanging Exchange. The purpose of the file format is to exchange, process and convert. PDF is also one of the exchange formats. The three considerations of the electronic exchange format are based on stability, flexibility, and application complexity. The industry should make a point of its own needs when selecting the operating mode and the exchange format. In the early days, many companies purchased software or systems to solve their work flow needs. They gradually began to purchase solutions to solve the overall problems in the workflow. Therefore, the evolution of printing standards entered the semi-open system and then the open system from the closed system, but Gradually, a custom process system will be created according to job requirements.
Huang Donghui, deputy general manager pointed out that the general industry's definition of "standard" is often misunderstood, so he mentioned that "conforming to standards does not equate to standards." For example, vector drawing software can also enter the bitmap file, but when it is archived After this file format should belong to the standard vector file format, or how to identify this mixed format, is often the blind spot of the operator on the standard format recognition. Similarly, the same problem arises when dealing with PDFs, but it is stored in a PDF file but cannot be used as an exchange format. Huang Donghui, the deputy general manager, believes that such restriction is not known as a way of protecting the industry's negative protection due to the fear of the distribution of profits.
The PDF/X format can be understood in another way, that is, PDF/X is treated as a subset of a particular format and treated as a stable exchange format for Graphics Art data. Since PDF/X has successively passed various ISO certifications, such as (ISO 15929:1999) PDF as a principle and principle for exchanging prepress data, (ISO 15930-1:2001) is an immediately printable complete exchange of CMYK files, (ISO 15930-2:2001) Partially exchanged files, (ISO 15930-3:2002) are suitable for blind exchange of color management and CMYK. At present, the format of PDF is not the final format, but it is still in the process of development. In the future there will be PDF/X-4...etc. And PDF is not just a format for processing printing, it may be used in offices, Internet, etc. Different needs.
The following deputy general manager of Huang Donghui shared his experience on the process of using the PDF/X format as the standard format of the workflow process for Kaili International Printing Co., Ltd. Huang Donghui, deputy general manager of the rabbit to sleep with the rest of the turtle as a metaphor, if you can use certain programs to allow the rest of the machine to operate correctly to make up for manpower shortage of time, then in theory the company can continue production without downtime. There are many Plug-ins in Adobe Acrobat to enhance Acrobat's ability to process PDFs, such as checking color mode, applicability of file versions, auto-offset setting, trapping, color separation output, etc. The concept of knowledge management is involved in production. It brings the expertise needed in production into the production process, reducing the use of manpower and reducing the error rate to increase efficiency. Huang Donghui deputy general manager at the meeting demonstrated on the spot the business card combination, packaging and printing, and the layout of the magazine layout with XML combined with metadata, such as the KM concept-style layout, and the random-size and top-down version of the database mechanism. The series of automated pre-press imposition operations, in the end, all use the PDF as the format for the exchange between processes, and then perform output, proofing, printing, and other actions according to the requirements of the latter stage.
Kylie International's experience is that PDF/X can solve the problem of mixing languages ​​in different language systems, systems, and platforms. It includes ICC color descriptions. The cost of proofing and proofreading is relatively low, while the automated equipment requires a lower error rate. Process design is integrated into the experience and the PDF/X standard is used as the process flow format, which is highly efficient.