Ten Years After: CIP4 and the Creation of JDF

The original JDF Specification was written by Bill Wyman of Adobe, Peter Schellekens of Agfa, Rainer Prosi of Heidelberg, Markus Möller of manroland, and Moritz Schwarz and Mark Herkrath, both of Fraunhofer, and the XML schema behind JDF was developed by Graham Mann of Adobe. This was a Herculean task—trying to develop a language that could support interchange of data and automation with all devices in any potential graphic arts production workflow. Even though JDF 1.0 was 463 pages long, it was not long enough to do everything. From the onset, JDF initially focused on commercial sheetfed printing workflows. While many early decisions were right "on target," some technical aspects of the early specification would later be fixed, such as the partitioning of NodeInfo and customer information or how layout information is structured. Even though some folks thought that the inclusion of Job Messaging Format was "over the top," it has since become a key component in JDF's ability to support automation. Rainer Prosi, who became and continues as CIP4's Technical Officer, also developed a software development kit that was used to prototype and test ideas as they were developed. These SDKs have remained very important to vendors supporting JDF.