PrintTalk® was a community formed by print management systems and e-commerce companies to define a "best practice" common and open communications interface between companies who buy printed products, and those who manufacture them. The PrintTalk® implementation supports and extends use of the broadly published, Job Definition Format (JDF) standard and Commercial eXtensible Markup Language (cXML). This PrintTalk specification is recognized as integral to the JDF standard. The PrintTalk® interface specification is distributed free of any license fees or royalties, in order to address the need for end-to-end connectivity in the printing industry.

In 2004, an agreement was reached between CIP4, PrintTalk and NPES for CIP4 to both host the PrintTalk specification and to assume its continued development, insuring seamless integration with current and evolving versions of JDF. This is an evolution of the close working relationship that has existed between CIP4 and PrintTalk since its inception.

Specification and Schema