Text Comparison in Artwork Management

How do you compare text?

All packaging artworks and labels contain text. This text starts its journey early in the product design life cycle and continues to be changed until it’s printed. The text originates from different departments, claims text from marketing, nutrition and ingredients text from formulation and product development, etc. As the product gets closer to launch, the text is finally given to a design team for it to be placed on the artwork.

This handover happens in numerous ways: through emails, word or excel documents or structured content in the form of XML (Pharma). The designer then cuts-and-pastes this content in the artwork and adjusts its font, size and other attributes based on regulatory and brand requirements. The artwork created by the designer is then shared across multiple departments, typically as a PDF file.

In a global company, thousands of Artworks get approved every year in different languages and in different markets. Most of the text in these artworks are proof-read by eye-balling the artwork and the brief side-by-side. This is repeated over and over again every time the artwork is changed. Most approvers just check the portions of the artwork where changes were requested, without realizing that when a designer opens an artwork file to edit, he or she can introduce errors inadvertently in any part of the artwork.

You’d think typographical errors are rare, but they’re surprisingly not – as this one following image would attest:

The quotes around the word tomato convey that it’s perhaps not a tomato sauce but rather a substitute or a sauce of an inferior quality. Errors like these can be overlooked by even the most meticulous experts while they’re comparing the original brief with the artwork. 

Text proofing tools not only take the drudgery out of proofing but increase the accuracy and reduce the time taken to proofread the artwork.

Going through the artwork approval process, the PDF artwork is compared with the brief document. In subsequent iterations, the current version of the PDF artwork is compared with the previous version of the PDF artwork.

To be continued…In our next blog, we will focus on how regulated industries like Pharma and CPG use text comparison tools in order to create error-free pack labels.

ManageArtworks is a Packaging Artwork Management Software that helps regulated industries like Pharmaceuticals and CPG to ensure regulatory compliance of their pack labels. It connects all stakeholders into an automated workflow, empowers users with sophisticated proofing tools including Text Comparison tools that reduce errors and speed up the process and gives complete transparency to the entire process with approval request tracking, audit trails and dashboards.

ManageArtworks is available as a ready to use cloud product or as a configurable on-premise solution. Click here to know more.