CIP4 Announces Version 1.3 of JDF Now Available

DARMSTADT, Germany—The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press, and Postpress (CIP4) announced that version 1.3 of the Job Definition Format has been published. Prior to this version, the JDF Specification was optimized for sheetfed and digital printing. JDF 1.3 introduces features to support web offset printing, newspaper production and packaging.

"JDF now models many types of packaging processes, a huge area of the printing industry," said Dr. Rainer Prosi of Heidelberg and CIP4's Technical Officer. "While it can now be said that JDF fully supports web offset and newspaper production, in the case of packaging, we've only introduced some basic functionality. We focused first on what is necessary to support board and folding carton converting and future editions of JDF will expand on this foundation to support other areas of packaging, such as flexible packaging."

JDF 1.3 now includes the ability to track individual elements on a page, whereas previously the page was the smallest job component that could be tracked. Job ganging, file format conversion to and from various file formats were also improved and JDF's consumable identification was enhanced.

The draft of JDF 1.3 was approved through CIP4's technical committees in early July of this year. The new Intellectual Property (IP) policy of CIP4 requires a 90-day review by members, and the extra three-month review period allowed CIP4 to update the JDF software development tools that CIP4 provides to its members.

Both the Java and the C++ JDF Application Program Interfaces (API) have been updated to JDF 1.3, as have the JDF Editor and the CheckJDF server; all of which CIP4 provides as a service to the industry.

"JDF 1.3 provides functionality for large and important segments of the printing industry," said Martin Bailey of Global Graphics and CEO of CIP4. "It's great to see both the new version of the specification and the software development tools that support JDF released concurrently, an unintentional benefit of our new IP policy. The ongoing development of JDF is intense. There are many people involved with JDF's development and they all deserve praise and thanks for all the work that went into this edition of JDF."

The JDF 1.3 PDF document can be downloaded from the CIP4's website, free of charge, at http://www.cip4.org/documents/jdf_specifications/index.html