Stuttgart Media University joins Ghent Workgroup

Stuttgart Media University covers a broad spectrum of media expertise, from printed to electronic media, mass media and media theory to production, and from design to making media available.

Ghent Workgroup, formed in June 2002, is an international assembly of industry associations, suppliers, educators and industry members. Ghent Workgroup is committed to producing specifications and sharing best practices for PDF exchange. Its goal is to provide tools and guidelines to automate and test processes in order to promote consistent output results. In October of last year, it released the Ghent PDF Output Suite 5, which allows end users of graphic arts equipment, as well as developers of applications that handle PDF files, to use this test suite to determine whether workflows are behaving as expected.

Professor Dr Thomas Hoffmann-Walbeck of Stuttgart Media University commented: ‘The work of the Ghent Workgroup is very important to us. We have joined to follow and participate in the process of developing specifications and share this knowledge with students.

‘We would like to make the work of Ghent Workgroup more popular among the students, so that they can master not only their practical projects during their studies, but above all their work in their future workplaces.’

Ghent Workgroup chairman David Zwang added: ‘Our goal is to create practical workflow tools that make daily production tasks easier and faster, and it is important for industry newcomers to receive exact instructions on the different prepress processes, especially in PDF creation, preflighting and production. We welcome the opinions from students of Stuttgart Media University and encourage them to promote the work of the Ghent Workgroup in their future print, publishing and packaging endeavors.’