Ten Years After: CIP4 and the Creation of JDF

During this period, JDF was also maturing, with additional support for a wider range of printing and printing processes. Device Capabilities, a major JDF feature, was also created and added to the specification. Craig Benson of Adobe and Rainer Prosi conceived Device Capabilities at the first Interop in Darmstadt, Germany. "The idea was to automatically check if a device could execute a given JDF command, a precursor to the long-term goal of establishing plug-n-play compatibility," said Prosi. "The difficulties of achieving plug-n-play in a networked production environment are much more complex than for the desktop, but we continue to work in that direction and Device Capabilities is the cornerstone of that work."