Processing Steps with Mako
📌 What are Processing Steps?
Processing Steps in PDF are a standardized mechanism for describing production-specific information that goes beyond the visual appearance of the page. They capture instructions or metadata about how the page or its content should be manufactured, processed, or finished.
Examples include:
Cutting and folding lines for packaging
Varnish or coating masks
Die cutting paths
Bleed or trimming information
Registration marks, proofing data, or printer calibration patches
These are not normally meant for end-user viewing, but are crucial in professional publishing and packaging workflows.
Why are they needed?
As PDF became the standard in graphic arts and print production (ISO 15930 – PDF/X), it was increasingly used for packaging, labeling, and industrial printing.
The problem:
Printers and packaging converters needed to include technical information (cut paths, fold lines, safety zones, ink coverage, etc.) inside the PDF.
Before standardization, this was often handled via proprietary layers or extra annotation conventions, leading to incompatibility and ambiguity.
The packaging industry (CIP4, Ghent Workgroup, and others) pushed for a standardized way to describe this data inside the PDF itself.
Thus, the ISO 19593 standard (“Processing Steps for Packaging and Labeling”) was developed and later incorporated into the PDF 2.0 standard (ISO 32000-2).
ℹ️ How They Work in PDF
Processing Steps are represented using:
Optional Content Groups (OCGs, i.e. PDF “layers”)
Processing Steps are usually stored as layers, so they can be toggled on/off in viewers.
Each Processing Step layer is tagged with metadata describing its role.
Standardized Metadata
Each Processing Step has a
/Category(e.g./Cut,/Fold,/Varnish,/WhiteInketc.).This metadata makes it machine-readable and consistent across tools.
Separation from Artwork
The visual artwork (what the consumer sees) is separate from processing instructions.
This ensures no accidental printing of die lines or technical guides.
☑️ Purpose & Benefits
Interoperability: Printers, packaging converters, and prepress systems can reliably exchange files without misinterpreting technical marks.
Automation: Workflow automation (cutting machines, folding systems, digital finishing devices) can directly extract the necessary instructions.
Standardization: Replaces ad-hoc “drawn lines” and vendor-specific metadata with ISO-defined categories.
Safety: Prevents costly mistakes like printing cutting lines on the actual product.
⌨️ Getting and setting processing step information in Mako
In Mako 8.2.0 new APIs were added to the IOptionalContentGroup class:
IOptionalContentGroup::getGTSProcStepsGroup()IOptionalContentGroup::getGTSProcStepsType()IOptionalContentGroup::setGTSProcStepsGroup()IOptionalContentGroup::setGTSProcStepsType()
For older versions of Mako, it is still possible to reach this information via the IPDFObject class, see this example on GitHub: https://github.com/mako-team/GetProcessingSteps that demonstrates how to do this.
📚 Additional Resources
If you need additional help, see our API documentation for detailed information on class/method usage, or raise a support ticket via our customer portal.