It is now the season for printing industry journalists to travel to various locations to hear from a range of vendors what they will be showing us at the forthcoming drupa. The first such event has just happened when a large number of the industry’s journalists from all around the world spent a week in Düsseldorf hearing from a number of vendors their announcements of drupa plans. Over the next few weeks other events will take place around Europe and the travelling circus of journalists will receive briefings from many other vendors. From these reports in all magazines will appear projecting what is to be seen at drupa, and what likely effects there will be on the printing industry.

Even before we began hearing of the vendor’s plans we were being told that this time it would be a “JDF drupa”. In 2000 we were told it would be a “digital drupa”. Now these are nice titles but what do or did they mean. I am sure that most people in the printing industry really have little real knowledge of what JDF is and what it will mean to them. For those of you who have so far managed to avoid the barrage of information about JDF it stands for Job Definition Format. That is all it is, a computer data format to allow different computers within the production and management process to pass information back and forth between them. It is up to the software within each of the computers to make use of this data that is being moved around to be of benefit to the printer.

In reality JDF is all about integrated manufacturing processes and the move to make printing more efficient. It is about taking manual processes in set-up out of the industry, and to attempt to manage the whole production process using as few people as possible. JDF is perceived as the answer to the problems of the printing industry in trying to satisfy a customer’s needs for faster turnarounds, lower costs, better quality and more control.