Data formats in digital prepress technology

The printing industry is on its way to become a multimedia industry. Printing will not be the only media and means of outputting information. Printed products and online media have a common prepress stage (premedia) which only diverges just before the functional output as electronic media or as printed media. A good example of the potential of the multimedia market is the use of efficient workflow. The data file can be directly transmitted to different media by efficient workflow. Thanks to digital technology, all captured text and image data can be used for multimedia purposes. An incorrect data format can affect the quality of a prepress product. The aim of this article is to discuss the most prevalent data formats used in open prepress systems.