The glory days of a rapidly growing printing market of the ’90s are barely a memory. The growth of the printing industry certainly has slowed, if not declined. With plenty of available capacity and the impact of competitive technologies, most printers face relentless price competition and shrinking margins. In this environment, it is imperative to improve operating efficiency throughout the entire production process. A key piece of this is linking the various parts of production—prepress, print, and postpress—not only with each other, but also with MIS, estimating, and job costing.

There’s been a great deal of misunderstanding about JDF. It is first an open technical specification, available to all. Second, not every piece of equipment, software, or production process will have to make use of the entire specification.

JDF (Job Definition Format), a standard developed by the CIP4 (The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress) organization is an attempt to do just that. CIP4 was formed in late 2000 to extend the work of its predecessor, CIP3. CIP3’s Print Production Format (PPF) found some success in ink key presetting and postpress operations. JDF is an XML-based job ticket format that provides key information about the job to “JDF compliant” equipment and software.