Sydney, Australia; September 1, 2005 -- Quickcut, a leading international provider of digital production workflow solutions to the advertising, publishing and print industries; today announces its membership in the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG). The GWG is an international assembly of graphic arts professionals established to create, test, and disseminate best practices and specifications for publishing workflows. Quickcut joins other key GWG technology members including Adobe, Agfa, Apago, Artwork Systems, Creo subsidiary of Kodak, CGC, Enfocus Software, Esko Graphics, Global Graphics, Heidelberg, One-Vision, pub-specs, Quark and Screen. "The Ghent PDF Workgroup is internationally recognized for the valuable work it carries out to standardize PDF production and delivery and its output specifications have become the benchmark for quality PDF assurance," says Joffre Carter, Marketing Director of Quickcut. "We are committed to the development of open standards that support practical and product-specific applications and look forward to working with GWG on the continued development of robust production workflows." David L. Zwang, Vice Chairman of the Ghent PDF Workgroup says, "Quickcut is a welcome addition to the GWG. An innovator in digital file delivery with strong global presence, we look forward to Quickcut's active participation with the GWG to help improve publishing workflows worldwide." Quickcut enables end-to-end, color-managed, preflighted and certified, digital workflows for mono/color advertising and believes it provides the most detailed and comprehensive PDF checking service. Its applications validate files against 250+ specifications including parameters such as minimum acceptable sizes for screened text, ink color weight restrictions, permissions for float and JPEG encoding, minimum and recommended image resolutions, PDF requirements and ICC colour profiles. These are in addition to clear and unambiguous data on the more obvious requirements such as trim, live and bleed dimensions. The GWG best practice specifications The GWG defines best practice specifications as guidelines to which a PDF file should conform in the production and pre-flighting of PDF files for a variety of applications. The specifications are sets of guidelines based on, and compliant with, ISO PDF/X standards; and enhanced with additional guidelines to support different market segments, different output processes or different workflows (today) i.e. magazine advertising, newspaper advertising, commercial sheet offset, web offset and (near future) packaging, silkscreen, large format digital, and gravure printing. Enhancing the existing (PDF/X) standards with practical, vertical marketspecifications and best practices allows for more secure and productive digital workflows. The specifications are a compilation of best practices achieved in the publishing industry.