Automation On the Road to Seamless

According to Steven Carter, co-chairman of the Packaging Subcommittee of the GWG and director of technology with the St. Louis Division of Alcoa's Southern Graphic Systems, "consumer product companies (CPCs) are pushing vendors toward PDF because of the promise of lower costs and shorter time to market via digital file exchange." At the same time, he says, "The current PDF structure doesn't adequately address features of packaging files like transparency and die layers, non-CMYK color sets, spot colors, varnishes," and other common features of packaging files that represent costly opportunities for error. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that market demands ultimately will validate the Subcommittee's work to establish workflows and a framework to define PDF as the ultimate exchangeable file format for packaging.