Text Comparison On Regulated Industries, Cpg And Artwork Management

By Author: Vilva Natarajan
Total Articles: 5
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Text Comparison in Regulated Industries

Pharma Industry

In the Pharma industry there are two standards that are used as Briefs

1. Structured Product Labelling (SPL) followed by the FDA
2. Quality Review of Documents (QRD) followed by the European Medicines Agency

In the CPG industry there are no such standards.

In the regulated markets, the SPL content (or extracts from it) are available as a Word document and this is the brief document given to the designer. The Word Document is typically a single column file while the PDF version of it from the designer is a multi-column version. The text flow does not always start from the first column in the PDF. Depending on the folding pattern of the leaflet or PIL, the text could start at the beginning of the last column and flow all the way to the first column.

This constant jumping across columns and matching them with text in the PDF file, make manual proofing cumbersome, tedious and error prone.

The QRD content is typically used to share text placed in labels. The placement of text on the label could be in any direction. ...
... The same text in the brief could be placed multiple times in the label. If the text 5 mg is used thrice in the label, the proof reader has to make sure it’s correct in all instances. When multiple components (label and carton) are prepared for the same SKU, the designer has to make sure certain text content are the same across both the components. The Proof reader has to not only check the correctness in one component artwork, but also make sure the same content is available across multiple components of the same SKU.
Such requirements make the need for automated proofing a mandatory thing rather than a nice-to-have.

Text Comparison in CPG Industry

With no standards available in the industry, each company has its own formats. However, there is a common pattern across most of these briefs. They are in one of these formats

1. In the form of a 2 column table in a Word Document. The first column has the names of the sections (e.g. Ingredients, Nutrition, Manufacturing address, etc.). The second column has the text against these section titles which the designer will use to cut-and-paste into the artwork.

2. In the form of a 2 column Excel Document. Its very similar to the Word Document described in 1, but managed in an Excel file

3. In the form of a Word Document with H1, H2 or H3 headings for the section names. The text within each heading is used by the designer for creating the label.

4. There are of course variations of the above used by many companies

Text Comparison in Artwork Management

All packaging artworks and labels contain text. This text starts its journey early in the product design lifecycle 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 to place on the artwork.

This handover of text happens in numerous ways, through emails, Word or Excel documents or structured content in the form of XML in the case of Pharma. The designer then cuts-and-pastes this content in the appropriate areas in the artwork and adjusts its font, size and other attributes based on regulatory and brand requirements. The artwork text along with its design elements are then sent (typically as a PDF file) to multiple departments for approval.

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. Sometimes people don’t have the time nor the inclination to proof read the text multiple times. They just trust someone else has done the job right and just approve it without checking. Most others 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.

Text proofing tools not only take the drudgery out of proofing the text but increases the accuracy and reduces the time taken to proof read the artwork.

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