Status of CGATS.12 Using PDF for Digital Data Exchange

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a format for representing composited electronic documents for the purpose of exchanging the document between a sender and a receiver that may not have had any prior communication. PDF provides an object based representation of the content of the electronic document; that is, there are different representations for the objects, the text, geometric graphics and raster images, of which the document is comprised. These object based representations efficiently encode the various object types and also provide a reproduction-device-independent representation of the digital data. The Committee for Graphic Arts Technologies Standards (CGATS) is developing a standard, CGATS.12, for the exchange of digital data using PDF. This work is motivated by the desire to allow the electronic transmission of the creative work of the graphic artist throughout the production workflow to final production either as a final image on media or a surrogate for that image, such as a printing plate. To avoid dependence on the set of applications used to create a graphic presentation, a standard format is necessary to allow transmission of the digital work through prepress shops to the publisher and on to the printer. The DDAP (Digital Distribution of Advertising for Publications) Association has been instrumental in encouraging and supporting this standardization. This paper provides an overview of PDF and a PDF workflow and describes how PDF can be used in conjunction with raster based workflow.