Ghent, Belgium – August 2, 2004 – During its quarterly general meeting on June 25th, the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) welcomed a new member, setup a new subcommittee for Office Document Printing and Marketing, and released a 2004 Base Line Format for Packaging PDFs. In addition it enlarged the membership of the current subcommittees for Specifications, Documentation, Job Ticketing, RIP output, Color Management, and Packaging. The General membership of the GWG meets four times a year and discusses and acts on admitting new members, setting up new subcommittees, and launching of new specifications and best practices in graphic arts and publishing workflows. During the recent meeting, held in Brussels on June 25th the General membership has accepted France Repro, representing over 20 digital printing companies in France, as a new Association Member, bringing the total of GWG members to 27 Associations and Vendors. The admission of France Repro came with the decision to start a new Office Document Printing Subcommittee that will handle the specific print ready PDF specifications and best practices workflow of documents that are not generated by Graphic Arts page layout software. The Ghent PDF Workgroup is inviting more Associations and Vendors in the area of Office Document Printing to join the GWG for defining the right specifications and best practice workflows for this area of the publishing and printing industry. The GWG General Meeting was also used to review the work of the existing subcommittees and increase the membership of them with the new members that have joined since the last general meeting in March 2004. The GWG subcommittees that are now active are: - Specifications - Job Ticketing - RIP output - Packaging - Color Management - Office Document Printing - Documentation - Marketing A Marketing subcommittee has been added to address the dissemination of best practices and of the print ready PDF/X Plus specifications for different workflows in the publishing industry. During last Drupa the GWG released the new 2004 (v 2) specifications for PDF/X Plus specific workflows for Newspaper and Magazine Ads, Sheet-fed- and Web-offset printing for cold-set, heat-set, CMYK or Spot color printing. After almost a year of testing, the Packaging subcommittee has now released the Base Line Format for Packaging PDF. The Base Line format for Packaging PDF includes specifications to create and control proper 1.4 PDF files including transparency and spot colors for proofing and exchange in packaging workflows between brand managers, design and prepress. In a later stage these packaging specifications and best practices workflows will be extended to the exchange of print ready PDF’s between prepress and packaging printers. The research for the Base Line format for Packaging PDF and the best practices workflows has been conducted by a large number of renowned brands, prepress houses, vendors and printers in the packaging industry in both Europe and the USA. The Base Line format for Packaging PDF will be published on the Ghent PDF Workgroup website www.ghentpdfworkgroup.org for more wide spread testing in the upstream creation and proofing workflow. The documentation on best practices will follow.