Jonathan Moore, digital manager at Condé Nast and chairman of the Pass4press committee, launched version 10 under the mantra "prepare, create, check".

"These three words are what we're trying to distil everything down to," he said. "We've tried to condense the specification down and make it a lot friendlier rather than a lot of dense information and heavyweight backend stuff."

Delegates at the launch were also given a practical overview of the production process, from file creation to press output.

Moore discussed the importance of colour management profiles, image resolution and compression, and preflighting in preparing PDF/X-1a files for print.

He was followed by Adobe senior application engineer Marcus Lynch, who discussed the output preview options within Acrobat and the preflight checks.

Meanwhile, Andy Psarianos, of FE Burman, urged production staff to use the Pass4press settings, together with standards such as those agreed by the Ghent PDF Workgroup, in order to save both time and money.

"Increasingly, the way to make money in this business is by automation," he said. "If we start doing these things, people can start automating based on the simple things we're doing along the way."