“We were getting an increasing number of requests from digital transactional and document printers,” said GMG Graphic Arts business manager Birgit Plautz.

“PDF/VT-1 is a big demand from customers such as banks and insurance companies as we are seeing that transactional print market using an increasing number of colour images.”

According to GMG, the support of PDF/VT-1 in version 4.9 of ColorServer massively increased the throughput to 3,500 pages per minute for the current 32-bit version, while a new 64-bit native version would allow “almost unlimited” processing capabilities.

Other developments include enhancements to the Paper Adaption tool, CMYK to RGB conversion and support for Konica Minolta spectrophotometers and new industry output profiles.

Building on the Paper Adaption tool introduced in version 4.8, new features include a new algorithm to produce a better visual match and the ability for users to create custom appearances in addition to the supplied standard print condition profiles.

Plautz said that the CMYK to RGB conversion tool had been added to address clients' needs to repurpose legacy data that that was only available in CMYK. The software reverses the separation process to create an Adobe RGB file from CMYK. It is claimed to be lossless when working with data previously separated using GMG software, although she admitted there might be some discrepancies for files originally separated using other tools.

The support for Konica Minolta FD 5 and FD 7 spectrophotometers was based on user demand, especially in Europe.  In particular the FD 7’s support of the M1 measuring conditions for working with papers containing optical brighteners, which enables firms to work under the forthcoming ISO 12647-2:2013 and ISO 15339 standards.