Welcome to the future of automation in the printing industry!
The CIP4 Organization is a not-for-profit standards association, whose mission is to foster the adoption of process automation in the printing industry. A global organization with representatives from 31 countries, CIP4’s membership is organizational and boasts a diverse membership that includes printers, prepress companies, publishers, vendors of graphic arts systems and software, integrators, distributors, consultants and educators.
XJDF – Building blocks for the “Printing Industry 4.0”
Published August 3, 2022
The Exchange Job Definition Format (XJDF), the JDF successor developed by CIP4, is set to become the future industry standard for automating processes in the printing industry. Its main advantages over JDF: XJDF enables systems from different manufacturers to communicate with each other without restrictions such as proprietary dialects. XJDF describes print products without redundancies and provides only the relevant information in the process sections. XJDF enables end-to-end communication between print buyers and print service providers — in real-time. At the same time, the PrintTalk specification has been raised to the current XJDF level.
The redesign of JDF also represents a paradigm shift in terms of other features, finally overcoming earlier fundamental problems. Regardless of this, JDF will continue to be maintained. But the focus is on a further expansion of the XJDF specification. This includes an already completed JSON mapping.
XJDF 2.0 was released in February 2018. The whitepaper mainly refers to version 2.1 from August 2020. The evolutionary XJDF specification is supported by new Interoperability Conformance Specifications (ICS). In this context, the whitepaper also describes the ICS for automatic print procurement (Cus-APP ICS) and for electronic quality data exchange between print buyers and print service providers (CusQC ICS) and between print shop MIS and production devices (MisQC ICS). Other ICS, not yet mentioned, are planned or already in progress.
