We’re now counting down to Fespa 2023 – this time to be held in Munich, 23 – 26 May.
We’ll be exhibiting alongside our sister company, Meteor Inkjet, on the Hybrid Software Group stand (Hall B2-Stand B55) and for the first time at Fespa will be showcasing SmartMedia™, a suite of components that simplifies the process of obtaining the best quality and color output from a digital press. It’s available with SmartDFE™, the full software and hardware stack that adds a print subsystem to the fully automated smart factory.
We launched SmartMedia to make it easy for press operators who are not color experts to get great color from their digital press. It reproduces spot colors accurately and easily using extended gamut or 7-color printing, which is particularly important for print applications such as textiles and packaging where reproducing color accurately from the original artwork is key.
Recently I was talking to one of our Mako™ partners, Actino Software, who are based in Germany. Actino have successfully built many document solutions for their customers with Mako, and a recent example was for a large German crane manufacturer with subsidiaries worldwide. The design, manufacture and maintenance of cranes requires a lot of documentation, and the company estimates they manage around 100,000 documents, mainly in PDF.
There are numerous challenges to managing such a large corpus of documents, and one of those is the quality of those documents. I’m not talking here about the content, but rather the way in which the PDF was produced. Many different authoring and PDF creation tools are in use, some going back decades, resulting in a wide variation in the way PDFs are constructed. This is where Mako comes in.
For this project, Actino Software built centralized services that analyze and optimize the PDFs and prepare them for secure delivery. Mako can do this quickly, processing 400 MB files with many thousands of pages, fast. The analysis function identifies the number of pages, bookmarks, fonts, embedded attachments and other features, including document metadata (title, subject etc). The optimize function removes invalid hyperlinks, changes named destinations into working hyperlinks, and resaves the file to a reduce file size. In this particular case, Mako reduced the file size by more than 50% thanks to image resampling. Mako’s built-in font optimization (eliminating duplicate fonts and merging of font subsets) is another way it can reduce file size.
This work supports two DRM (digital rights management) workflows:
Distribution via a portable storage device such as thumb drive, supported by a plug-in to Adobe Acrobat Reader that talks back to the company website for authentication.
Download from a secure website, for which small file size is a must.
Actino were able to meet the customer requirements with a rapid development schedule, based on their understanding of document workflows and their familiarity with the Mako Core SDK. Their customer chose the Actino solution over an Adobe DRM solution, which was considered too expensive and rigid.
HP Site Flow is a workflow and production automation system for HP digital press owners.
When HP Inc began developing HP Site Flow, an end-to-end workflow and production automation system for HP digital press owners, they encountered several challenges including: addressing the growing personalized market; the need to ‘normalize’ PDFs, given the wide variation in the quality of files entering the system; and the ability to quickly scale up or down to accommodate varying levels of demand.
Read the case study to see how Mako Core™ SDK proved its capability and adaptability by rising to HP Site Flow’s development challenges, resulting in increased productivity and profitability for its users.
The Hybrid Software Group team at Hunkeler Innovationdays 2023
It’s great to be back in Lucerne this week for Hunkeler Innovationdays 2023. We’ve had some interesting conversations and it’s been a good opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues in the industry. But it’s not over yet! If you’re interested in adding a print subsystem to a smart factory or manufacturing line, come and talk to us on booth 45 to find out more about our SmartDFE™.
This year, we’re exhibiting on the Hybrid Software Group booth, alongside our sister companies: ColorLogic, HYBRID Software, iC3D, Meteor Inkjet and Xitron. In this recent interview with Inkish TV, our CEO, Mike Rottenborn, explained how we all work together and what you can expect to see from the Group at Hunkeler Innovationdays:
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This month we’re celebrating the 20-year anniversary of our Japanese office. We chatted to sales director Hagiwara Yoshiyuki who told us how it all began, how the market has changed and what’s next for his team:
Hagiwara Yoshiyuki, front left, and the team from the Global Graphics office in Japan join colleagues from Hybrid Software Group at the IGAS exhibition in Tokyo last year.
Tell us about your background. What did you do before you joined Global Graphics Software?
After graduating from university, I worked for a Japanese office computer manufacturer, developing various controller boards, ASICs and semi-custom large-scale integrations. The printer controllers I designed were very successful and widely installed not only in Japan, but also in Europe and Oceania. We were one of the first companies to develop a serial impact printer that prints Kanji characters for the office market. I designed many controller boards and firmware for laser printers, inkjet printers and RIP servers for large format printers. I then set up the Japanese subsidiary of a US company providing PostScript Level 2 interpreter software licenses to printer and MFP manufacturers.
After working with several foreign companies that developed RIP servers and embedded controllers, I established Global Graphics KK as a Japanese subsidiary in 2003.
Tell us about the early days with Global Graphics KK
Initially I rented the smallest room from Servcorp, an office rental company offering fully furnished spaces. On seeing my office, Gary Fry, former CEO with Global Graphics PLC, commented that it was ‘smaller than an elevator’. Over the years I’ve employed more engineers and have changed rooms several times to accommodate us. Today, we are five very talented engineers.
Back in 2003, I offered solutions for the Harlequin RIP® and the PDF creation software, Jaws PDF Creator™. My first customer was Justsystem. We developed the Justsystem PDF Creator, which was sold as a standalone packaging application then bundled as part of their Ichitaro word processing software. Ricoh Ridoc and Fuji Xerox DocuWorks followed.
Today, the team supports a range of products from Hybrid Software Group including, Harlequin, Mako Core™ and SmartDFE™ from Global Graphics Software; color management solutions ColorAnt, CoPrA, ZePrA from ColorLogic; pre-press software for packaging STEPZ®, PACKZ® and CLOUDFLOW® from HYBRID Software; and 3D rendering software for packaging from iC3D.
How has the market changed over the last 20 years? You must have seen a lot of changes.
Yes, there have been many changes: Firstly, companies that used to develop everything in-house are starting to consider using ready-to-integrate products, which offer a faster time-to-market. Our SmartDFE is ideal for this.
Secondly, the decrease in profits from office MFPs and printers, partly due to less paper being printed to help the environment, means office printer manufacturers are expanding their reach into industrial inkjet printing.
In addition, we’re seeing growth in digital printing, especially printing customized products on demand and in the labels and packaging sector. We’re seeing many new applications, for example, textiles and décor, due to the non-contact printing characteristics of inkjets. Digital inkjet is also growing as it meets many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Ways of doing business are also changing, with more cloud-based solutions and there’s also the introduction of 3D printing.
How important is sustainability in print to the Japanese market? Have you noticed a change in your customers’ requirements so that they can meet their sustainability commitments?
From a sustainability perspective, it’s essential that we consider the SDGs when developing new products and it seems to be easier for a company to follow through with their plans when they are linked to those goals. The amount of ink, electricity and iron needed for large-sized printing machines cannot be ignored. Also, as I mentioned earlier, we need to consider new ways of working to eliminate paper usage.
What’s next for you and your colleagues?
We will focus on promoting ready-to-integrate products, such as SmartDFE. In addition, as an ambassador for the Hybrid Software Group, we’ll focus on promoting the Group’s industry-leading products.
What do you enjoy most about working at Global Graphics KK?
It’s said that Japan is ‘the world’s printer factory’ where there are many printer manufacturers. This has certainly been an advantage; I enjoy building on my experience as a printer controller developer and using my knowledge of PostScript to ensure the best outcomes.
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In this second post about digital watermarking in the print workflow, author Martin Bailey explains the stages when it’s possible to add a digital watermark.
Digital watermarking is an emerging technology, part of the latest step on the evolution of product identification. Global Graphics Software has partnered with Digimarc, a leader in digital watermarking and a member of our Partner Network, to explore this topic and future developments.
Adding a digital watermark during the design stage
In some workflows the designer may apply digital watermarks to a design by, for instance, using a plugin to an application such as Adobe Illustrator. This is equally appropriate for both steganography and an artwork masking layer, and gives the maximum opportunity for approval of the design with the digital watermark in place, and for any rework to the design that might be requested to realize the greatest benefit from using that watermark. It will not normally be appropriate for the digital watermark to be added by the designer if each instance of the print requires unique data to be encoded in it; variable data composition is usually performed later in the workflow.
Application of digital
watermarking has different advantages and disadvantages at
various stages in the design and production workflow.
Adding a digital watermark in composition/prepress
In other workflows adding the digital watermark may be a function of a variable data composition or prepress department. Just as for application by the designer, this is applicable for both steganography and an artwork masking layer. There is a reasonable opportunity for approval of the design with the digital watermark in place. But it would be slower and more expensive to rework the design if that is required at this stage than if the watermark were added by the designer.
If the digital watermark is added in prepress then it can carry both static and variable data. As discussed above, however, variable data is best suited to use of an artwork masking layer rather than steganography, if only because of the amount of data that must be generated and then incorporated into a PDF file when steganography is used for a significant number of unique codes.
But applying even an artwork masking layer in prepress does bulk up the resulting print-ready PDF file with many copies of that layer, each one carrying different data. And it can also slow down processing in the Digital Front End (DFE) for a digital press. An overprinted graphic covering large areas of each piece of output in the PDF file can make it harder for the variable data optimization in a DFE to break the design apart so that it can minimize the total amount of processing required to read, color manage, render and halftone screen the job. (See Global Graphics Software’s guide: Full Speed Ahead: How to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press.)
Late-binding in the Digital Front End (DFE)
A new development in the application of digital watermarking is to add the marks right at the very last minute before the data is printed. In our SmartDFE™, for example, this can be done in parallel with or after the color management and rendering.
Applying the watermarks in parallel with color management and rendering (in the RIP) allows full access to all color channels for the output, while also removing the need to generate a fully resolved “optimized PDF” or PDF/VT file containing all of the variable data further upstream. In turn, this can reduce the overhead of optimizing variable data processing in the RIP. The final result is increased throughput, both in composition/prepress and in the DFE.
Applying marks after the RIP enables even higher performance through the DFE, with the added benefit of providing a more predictable processing speed because the amount of processing required is more deterministic than is rendering PDF. This might restrict the watermark to be painted in only one color channel, though.
Increasing speed and predictability in the DFE allows the use of lower cost hardware in those DFEs, or assists with printing at full engine speed for a larger proportion of jobs.
Late-binding application of digital watermarks will also always occur in an environment where the characteristics of the press that will be used to print the items are known, including resolution, bitdepth etc.
These benefits make this the optimum choice for highly efficient printing workflows for variable data digital watermarks, driving digital presses at full engine speed. The trade-offs are that it’s a little harder to review and approve proofs of the output, and that use for images with steganography is not usually appropriate.
White paper: Optimizing digital watermarking in print workflows
About the author
Martin Bailey, former distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, is currently the primary UK expert to the ISO committees maintaining and developing PDF and PDF/VT. He is the author of Full Speed Ahead: how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press, a guide offering advice to anyone with a stake in variable data printing including graphic designers, print buyers, composition developers and users.
Digital watermarking is an emerging technology, part of the latest step on the evolution of product identification. Global Graphics Software has partnered with Digimarc, a leader in digital watermarking and a member of our Partner Network, to explore this topic and future developments.
In this first of two posts, Martin Bailey explains the ways you can add a digital watermark:
A digital watermark may be added in one of two ways:
1. Using steganography If a product design includes images, whether photographic or generated digitally, data can be hidden within that image data using steganography. Steganography is the practice of concealing a message within another message or a physical object (source: Wikipedia).
In order to hide the data, the color values of individual pixels in the image are altered in a way that is intended to not be obvious to the human eye. The alterations may need to be applied slightly differently depending on the image content and the print technology to be used. This means it’s often valuable to be able to proof a design with the images in place, and to do that either on the printing device that will be used for production, or on one that has been carefully tuned to reproduce color, tones and levels of detail to match that production device.
Alternatively both the printer/converter and their customer can inspect the artwork and verify the Digimarc code using PACKZ® or CLOUDFLOW® Proofscope, professional prepress tools from HYBRID Software. As well as checking for the correctness of the code, this also allows verification that the code placement conforms to the customer’s requirements, and supports a formal approval process.
Reviews of the proofed output may lead to a decision to re-embed the data into the image with slightly different parameters. Systems to automate that adjustment are improving, but the advisability of proofing means that steganography is best used at a point in the workflow where an appropriate review and reconfiguration may be made without disrupting throughput.
Steganography is a very effective technique if the same image will be used on every instance of an item because it can be difficult for a forger to reproduce. But if your goal is to encode unique data in each instance, you’d have to generate an altered image for each one. When you’re producing watermarks for a large number of instances that would mean generating a huge number of copies of what started off as a single image. In most workflows and for most products that’s not a commercially viable approach.
2. Artwork masking layer The second method for adding a digital watermark is to overlay an “artwork masking layer” that encodes the desired data. This is a pattern of graphics across large areas of the design, making sure that those graphics are sufficiently fine that they are not immediately apparent to a viewer. In practice this usually means something that looks like a sprinkling of very fine dots under a magnifying glass or loupe.
A digital watermark as an artwork masking layer over a plain yellow area of a job.
These overlays are also very difficult for a forger to reproduce. They have the advantage over hiding data in images that they can also be used in efficient workflows to carry unique data for each product instance; there is much less data to handle for every copy.
White paper: Optimizing digital watermarking in print workflows
About the author
Martin Bailey, former distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, is currently the primary UK expert to the ISO committees maintaining and developing PDF and PDF/VT. He is the author of Full Speed Ahead: how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press, a guide offering advice to anyone with a stake in variable data printing including graphic designers, print buyers, composition developers and users.
Are you confident that all your print jobs can be printed at full press speed? How do you know at what speed the press can be run for a given combination of print job – RIP / RIP – PC etc.
In his presentation at the recent FuturePrint Tech Digital Print for Manufacturing, David Stevenson explains how, using Streamline™ and the help of machine learning, we can analyze a PDF file and intelligently estimate how long it will take for that file to run through the press. But it doesn’t stop there: David explains how we can then optimize the file to ensure it will fly through the press without compromising quality or color integrity.
It’s always good to see our technology being used in the ‘real world’; it really helps us to understand our customers’ daily challenges so we can develop software to make their lives easier.
With this in mind, we recently visited Baker Labels, a leading UK trade label printer with over 45 years’ experience in the business. Bakers has three HP Indigo WS6900 presses, an HP Indigo 20000 press, a Truepress Jet L350 UV and L350 UV+LM inkjet press, as well as a Nilpeter FB3 flexographic press.
Managing director Justin Bailey reflects on our visit:
Global Graphics Software’s technology is used by many thousands of printing companies around the world. We’re committed to innovation and to continue to innovate it’s important that our software developers understand the challenges faced by those companies in the printing industry. I wanted to take our team to an environment where the code they have written might be used.
I set out to find a printing company that shared our values in innovation and would be happy to show us around their facilities. My research led me to Baker Labels, a leading UK print provider for the label and packaging market, who embraced the idea of welcoming us and showing us round.
The thing that struck me immediately about Bakers, was the pride they had in their business and the culture they had built, which clearly radiated as soon as you walked through the door. It was also a bonus to learn that they use PACKZ® and CLOUDFLOW® from our sister company, HYBRID Software, to automate many of their processes.
Bakers also work very closely with HP Indigo in both their label printing business, and BakPac, their flexible packaging business. This meant that our Harlequin RIP® engineers could see presses working that used the technology they had developed deep inside the HP Indigo digital front end. This gave them a sense of real purpose and pride.
One of the HP Indigo 20000 presses at Baker Labels.Baker’s BakPac digital flexible packaging business prints short to medium runs of stand-up pouches, pillow pouches and printed film for trade customers looking for a high-speed-to-market option for their customers.
Bakers’ domain expertise was clear for our team to see: Jamie Godson did an incredible job of explaining the application of technology and challenges that they face within the industry; Jamie Doogan provided important perspective on commercial considerations; and Simon Chandler shared his perspectives on technical infrastructure necessary to stay competitive in the market.
Feedback from my team was overwhelmingly positive and the energy that they got from the visit will be something that I am confident will continue to resonate within our engineering team, spurring on new ideas to solve challenging technical problems. Bakers’ willingness to engage in such conversations will no doubt help us all to do what we do better and facilitate solutions which may well have a broader market application.
On behalf of the Global Graphics Software and Hybrid Software Group PLC, I would like to express my gratitude to Steve Baker and his team for their incredible hospitality and willingness to collaborate. It’s meeting people at companies like Bakers that makes getting out of bed in the morning exciting, and it’s no surprise to me that they are as successful as they are. Long may it continue.
Managing director, Justin Bailey, left, with the team from Global Graphics Software and Jamie Godson, Jamie Doogan and Simon Chandler from Baker Labels.
About the author
Justin Bailey, Managing Director, Global Graphics Software
Justin Bailey has been managing director at Global Graphics Software since 2018. He has over 25 years’ experience in the document imaging and print markets.
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Two new guides, one for designers and one for developers, to ensure best practice in creating PDF files for variable data printing are available now from the PDF Association.
When talking with digital press vendors it soon becomes apparent that the only thing more important than speed is quality; the only thing more important than quality is cost; and the only thing more important than cost is speed. I think I’d have to ask M C Escher for an illustration of that!
To focus on speed, what a press vendor usually means when talking to Global Graphics Software is “I need the Digital Front End (DFE) for my press to be able to print every job at full engine speed”, which is a subject that we’re very happy to talk about and to demonstrate solutions for, even as the press engines themselves get faster with every new version.
But the components such as the RIP in a DFE are not the only things that can affect whether a press can be driven at full engine speed. There are plenty of things that a designer or composition engine can do that can vary how fast a PDF file can be RIPped by several orders of magnitude, without affecting the visual appearance of the print.
Obviously we like it when the files are efficiently built, but sometimes it’s not obvious to a designer, or a software developer working on either a design application or composition engine how they might be able to improve the files that they generate. That’s why we created a guide called “Do PDF/VT Right” back in 2014, stuffed full of actionable recommendations for both designers and developers making PDF files for variable data printing.
It’s been very well received, and clearly filled a gap in materials available for the target audience; there have been thousands of downloads and printed copies given away at trade shows.
At the end of 2020 a new PDF/VT standard, PDF/VT-3, was published, and the committee in ISO that had developed it asked the PDF Association to write application notes for it, to assist developers implementing it with more extensive detail than can be included in International Standards. That sounds very formal, but in practice the two committees have many members in common (as an example I was project editor on PDF/VT-3 and I co-chair the PDF Association’s PDF/VT Technical Working Group (TWG)). The hand-over was mainly to enable much more agile and responsive document development and more flexibility around publication.
After some debate the PDF/VT TWG decided that what the industry really needed was a best-practice guide in how to construct efficient PDF files for VDP, whether they’re PDF/VT or ‘just’ “optimized PDF”. Any developer who has worked with PDF/VT-1 should have no trouble in implementing VT-3, but there are still some issues with slow processing of very inefficient PDF files preventing print service providers, converters etc from running their digital presses at full engine speed.
The next step was to agree to do the development of that guide in a new form of committee within the PDF Association, specifically so that people who were not members of the Association could be involved.
At this stage Global Graphics offered the text of Full Speed Ahead as a starting point for the Association guide, an offer that was very quickly accepted. But it was felt that it could be made more accessible if two editions of the guide were produced: one for designers and one for developers, rather than combining the two into a single document. Amongst other things it means that each guide can use the most appropriate terminology for each audience, which always makes reading easier.
We were lucky to have Pat McGrew working with us and she took over as champion for the designer edition, while I led on the developer one.
And so I’m very happy to announce that both the Developer and Designer editions of the PDF Association’s “Best Practice in creating PDF files for Variable Data Printing” have just been published and are available with a lot of other useful resources at https://www.pdfa.org/resources/.
Martin Bailey, former distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, is currently the primary UK expert to the ISO committees maintaining and developing PDF and PDF/VT and is the author of Full Speed Ahead: how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press, a guide offering advice to anyone with a stake in variable data printing including graphic designers, print buyers, composition developers and users.
