Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors often encounter a persistent challenge: handling PDFs with a mix of tools that aren’t designed to work together. To support essential workflows like rendering, preflight checks, optimization, and color management, many DAM systems rely on multiple separate libraries, each with its own requirements, licensing, and quirks.
This fragmented setup can introduce:
- Higher integration complexity, requiring custom code to connect incompatible systems
- Multiple points of failure, where a single tool update or incompatibility can disrupt the workflow
- Increased costs, from licensing fees, maintenance, and developer time spent troubleshooting
Beyond cost and complexity, this approach can impact performance and user experience. Multi-tool pipelines often slow down PDF rendering, delay previews, and make it harder to maintain consistent color accuracy across devices. In creative, marketing, and packaging workflows, these slowdowns can stall production and reduce trust in the DAM platform.
The challenge is compounded by evolving PDF standards, diverse file sources, and the growing need for more granular PDF manipulation, for example, from fixing broken files during ingest to ensuring proof-accurate previews for print. For DAM vendors, managing this complexity while keeping systems scalable and reliable is an ongoing struggle.
This is where Mako Core™ comes in. Mako (with optional GPU-native Apex™ Renderer), is an all-in-one PDF processing and rendering engine built to transform how DAM platforms handle PDF workflows. It replaces traditional, fragmented PDF toolchains with a single, high-performance SDK that delivers speed, accuracy, and automation.
With Mako Core SDK, DAM providers gain a single, unified API for:
- PDF rendering with print-accurate fidelity
- Preflight checks and automated corrections
- File optimization for faster storage and delivery
- Integrated ICC color management from ColorLogic
This consolidation reduces development time, speeds up feature deployment, and ensures consistent PDF handling across the platform. This is far beyond the capabilities of traditional DAM PDF viewers, enabling true production-safe PDF transformation.
When paired with Apex renderer, which uses the GPU to process files, Mako delivers instant, high-fidelity PDF previews that give an exact match to print output, incremental rendering for rapid multi-page navigation, and cloud scalability for thousands of concurrent preview requests.
By switching to Mako Core SDK, DAM vendors gain:
- Speed — multi-threaded, optimized PDF rendering and processing
- Reliability — automatic repair of problem PDFs during ingest
- Accuracy — previews that match final print output
- Automation — built-in preflight, optimization, and transformation
- Future-proofing — ready for PDF 2.0 and evolving print/packaging standards
For more information visit: www.globalgraphics.com/mako
About the author
Justin Bailey has been the managing director at Global Graphics Software since 2018. He has over 25 years’ experience in the document imaging and print markets.
Email: Justin.bailey@globalgraphics.com
LinkedIn: Justin Bailey | LinkedIn
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