ARE FILE FORMATS A LIMITING FACTOR?
A continuing question will be whether file formats continue to be a limiting factor for market growth. JPEG specifications were first written in 1983 and deployed in 1986. Media agile formats such as JPEG-2000, FlashPix and J-BIG have not caught on for various reasons — an unfortunate fact for the marketplace, where pent-up demand for cross-media publishing ease is inhibited by dated file formats. Media independence, rapid transformation and strong compression algorithms will continue to be a need in the market — especially as automated publishing drives mass personalized communications.Notably, for digital print workflows, RIPing of traditional file formats is still a stumbling block in the production process. Could a pre-RIPed image file format with variable resolution help drive efficiency for that growing industry?XML derivatives continue to hold great promise, although SVG is a nimble file format that has had lukewarm success. The XMP data standard is leveraged by all viable DAM c
