Digital Print World: Digital technology converges at DPW.

Presses are no longer the mainstay of digital development, a fact that this year's show underlines.

You could argue that using the term digital to classify a print show would be unnecessary today. Wherever you look within the printing process, from design to distribution, digitisation is having a profound effect. What were once considered bleeding-edge technologies - digital presses, digital photography and digital design - are now commonplace.

Such has been the rate of change that what was once the preserve of top-end equipment, commanding top-end prices, is now available to everyone on their desktop. But taking a strict approach to the naming of technology ignores the fact that digital is driving developments and is a useful marketing tool as it defines the latest developments in one word.

To an extent the broadening of the remit at this year's Digital Print World is a natural consequence of, somewhat contrarily, convergence within the industry. Pre-press workflows are starting to converge. Where you once had a standalone RIP and workflow for the digital press, the platesetter, wide-format printer and possibly even proofer, firms are increasingly looking for common workflows that are output device agnostic as they incorporate different output devices in their factories. The tools to provide integrated workflows have been around for a while, but it has taken time for them to begin to be put together. The time now seems to be right.

There has been a recent flurry of activity from the major vendors, most noticeably Xerox with its FreeFlow concept working with partners including EFI and Creo, to promote the benefit of workflow for digital print. Fundamental to this development is the realisation that digital jobs are by their nature short run and short turnaround, so the pre-press has to be as fast and efficient as possible to get the jobs out the door on time and on budget. And that means keeping operator intervention and manual processing to a minimum, which means workflow automation.

Drag and drop operation

One development is the broadening of workflow upstream and downstream. Integration is leading to pre-press becoming more tightly integrated with MIS, with the boundaries blurring between the two. Workflow integration is also extending to the customer with artwork delivery - either via a web browser or increasingly a desktop icon for drag and drop operation and remote proofing being linked directly to pre-press production.