The rivals are members of a group working to develop open standards for PDF printing.Quark Inc. announced this week that it has joined rival Adobe Systems Inc. as a member of the GWG, which is working to establish standards for publishing workflows.
Assuring correct printing of documents in Quark's desktop publishing program, QuarkXPress, is one of the company's reasons for joining the group, said Hans Hartman, desktop product marketing manager at Quark.
"Part of our interest is that we're very focused on the ways in which PDF goes from paper to a print environment," Hartman said.
"Many times PDFs go through a different kind of usage in interoffice communications, [in which] people add in other things like QuickTime movies or Flash that makes the document not always printable."
Quark joins several other vendor members of the international body, including PDF creator Adobe Systems, AgfaPhoto GmbH and Enfocus Software Inc.
Ghent PDF workgroup first allowed vendors to become members in April 2004.
Hartman said that over the last 18 months, Quark has committed itself to following industry standards.
"With XML, JDF and other initiatives, people say, 'You know what? There's not a single-vendor solution that serves my needs.' Our biggest concern is to serve our customers," Hartman said.
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For his part, David Zwang, principal of Danbury, Conn.-based consulting firm Zwang & Company and vice chairman of GWG, said that the relationship between the user association members and the vendor members is a symbiotic one.
"Since the users are now establishing, through consensus, their requirements, the vendors have a better idea of where to go with their development and the users get the benefits of that. Quark is an important player in the global print publishing community, and their participation the work done in the GWG is very important," Zwang said.
According to Zwang, GWG puts forth a series of specifications and best practices that are specific to a variety of industry-related uses, including for newspapers, magazines, commercial print and so forth.
"These specifications and best practices sit on top of existing standards like PDF/X [and] JDF. Their goal is to ensure that file creation and submission will meet the requirements of each of the business applications, and that once created, that same file can be used anywhere in the world to support that application," Zwang said.
"[The] most significant role of the GWG is that it has, and continues to, bring together the global graphic arts user and vendor communities to gain consensus and establish 'global' specifications and best practices to support the increasingly global nature of the business environment. Historically these specifications and best practices were regional or country-based," Zwang said.
According to Hartman, Quark's membership in GWG serves a twofold purpose.
"It gives us the opportunity to speak directly with people so that our feet remain on the ground with various industries, such as with newspapers and magazines, and that we listen and respond to those needs," Hartman said.
"Also, going forward, we will start rolling out new releases with new features, and while I cannot refer directly to those features at this point, let me say we are bouncing back ideas with these people [and] getting feedback as we get closer to these announcements, so there is no thinking about these new features in a vacuum," he said.
Added Hartman: "We could have responded by saying that the PDF format was invented by Adobe, and so we're not interested. But PDF is an open standard, and, increasingly, we live in an open world, with open standards."
Document Management 
