This website is dedicated to the support and documentation of the work of the “Printing across borders” initiative. The following links lead to the main areas of this website:

• Background
• Documents
• Events
• Mailing list
• How to contact [pab]

The next [pab] meeting will be held during the upcoming IPA Conference:

• Wednesday, June 7th, 2006
• 6:30 - 9:00 pm
• Westin O'Hare, Chicago

Those planning to attend should signup at http://www.idealliance.org/activities/meetings/pab/signup.asp. More information about the IPA Conference can be found at http://www.ipa.org/.

Agenda:

• Welcome and Introductions - Gerry Gerlach
• Update from ISO TC130 WG3 April Meeting - Larry Warter
• Status of developing Unified Characterization Data for #1 Coated Sheetfed Offset Commercial Printing - Andi Kraushaar & Don Hutcheson
• Effort to scientifically test the new Gray-balance Process control methods - Don Hutcheson
• Update on SWOP web press runs and status of characterization data set development for #3 publication web printing - Steve Smiley

The [pab] meeting on Sunday, April 9, 2006, in Birmingham during IPEX was quite a suscess - over 40 attendees followed presentations from Patricia Wales (Sappi), Gerry Gerlach (GRACoL), Dieter Dolezal and Olaf Drümmer (both from the European Color Initiative). Topics presented were:

• Gray balance control - two views
  • GRACoL 7 (Gerry Gerlach)
  • ECI/bvdm GrayCon (Olaf Drümmer, Dieter Dolezal)
• Paper classification and optical brighteners (Patricia Wales)

We hope to have the presentations available for download shortly, meanwhile you may want to check out the audio recording of the meeting (please find it at the bottom of that page).

Around 30 industry experts from Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Spain as well as the USA met on January 18, 2006, in Copenhagen to learn about the current status of implementation of printing standards as well as future developments. Several presentations given during the [pab] meeting can be downloaded here. On the next two days “Printing across borders” was explained and discussed repeatedly during various sessions of the "CM 2006" color management conference, which turned out to be a very successsful event with more than 160 attendees.

During the “Printing across borders” meeting held on September 20, 2005, in Stuttgart during the Digitalproof-Forum, experts from all across Europe vividly discussed recent developments in global printing standards. A presentation given by Olaf Drümmer can be downloaded here.

With participants from the Americas, Europe and the Far East the “Printing across borders” meeting during Print 05 in Chicago was a real success. Presentations from Olaf Drümmer and Don Hutcheson explained the status quo of standardized printing and highlighted the differences between the current ISO based approach and new concepts currently put to tests by GRACoL. Lively discussions made it clear that promoting and implementing international printing standards has become a hot topic virtually everywhere in the world. Please see the Events section for downloads of the presentations.