The Ghent Workgroup (GWG) announces the completion and immediate availability of a new specification version called GWG 2022. The last major GWG specification was released in 2015. Since then, separate efforts took place for specific market segments such as Sign & Display, Digital Print and Packaging, but there was no real consolidation into the base specification. This made it more difficult to use the specification and more difficult for the Ghent Workgroup to evolve it. The GWG 2022 specification changes that by introducing new innovations on a new, streamlined, specification format:

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The document Differences between the GWG 2015 and 2022 specifications explains the differences between the old and the new specifications. Explanations of the new specification can be found in the document GWG 2022 Specification explanation.

Up to now, Ghent Workgroup specifications were released in a Word document that described all requirements and had tables for each variant to specify which requirements were used for each variant. As the specifications became more technical and more complex, this proved to be difficult to work with. GWG 2022 is released instead as a highly structured spreadsheet created with Google Sheets, which clearly defines definitions, requirements, and variants. The definitions and requirements have been rewritten in a more standardized and exact fashion and include unique IDs, version numbers and more to make it easier for software vendors to work with them.

The basic rules for the variants have remained the same. However, two innovative (optional) extensions have been added:

Processing Steps

In label and packaging workflows, a major new ISO standard (known as ISO 19593-1) was introduced that makes it possible to identify elements in a design needed for specific processing steps. The easiest example is perhaps that it provides a good way to identify cut and fold lines in a complex design. The GWG 2022 specification includes support for the Processing Steps standard and identifies which processing steps should and should not be present for different packaging products.

Cutting down on false positives

Over the last years, several vendors created technology designed to cut back on the number of false positives during preflight. You don’t want to stop a file because of an image if it is totally clipped away or covered by other page content, for example. The GWG 2022 specification makes it possible for such technology to be used and defines the rules. This means that a preflight using GWG 2022 compliant profiles allows you to focus on those files that really would cause problems.

Unfortunately, Adobe Acrobat Pro Preflight does not currently provide this functionality!