The Ghent Working Group, GWG, has been releasing workflow specifications for PDF creation and processing for some time now. These latest specifications have been very interesting. The previous release dealth with conversion of MS Office documents to PDF. The latest is a best practices specification that allows you to review the preflight activities that have been performed on the PDF.
If you receive a PDF that has been preflighted and those activities have been documented and digitally signed according to this specification then you will not have to doubt the condition of the PDF. The specific preflight specification can been tracked and you can be assured that the PDF is compliant with the correct PDF standard(ie PDF/X1-a, PDF/X-3, etc).
As these best practices are released and implemented by organizations the cost of pre-press processing will be lowered. Also this will lowered the number of times that redundant preflighting will have to take place for each PDF and thus lowering the overall cost of handling the document. Questions always arise as to why organizations are moving more and more of their documents to PDF. When compared to other less robust formats you can see how the cost savings achieved from lower processing effort alone make PDF attractive.
