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.
The CIP4 organization and the Hochschule der Medien (HdM) will be hosting a symposium on the topics of workflow automation, Print 4.0 and (X)JDF for the twelfth event on September 15, 2022. Starting at 9:30 a.m., lectures and live demonstrations are on the agenda until 5:10 pm. The event will provide in-depth insights and practical advice on smart workflow solutions - a topic that has grown considerably important in recent years. Representatives of print and media companies, manufacturers, students and all interested parties are invited.
Participation at the symposium is free of charge. The symposium will take place at the Media University. Most presentations are in German. Many of the presenters are key members of the CIP4 organization.
The 42nd. bi-annual CIP4 Interop is currently taking place in Stuttgart Germany on the dates Sept. 12-16.
This meeting will also be in conjunction with the Hochschule Der Medien Workflow Symposium also in Stuttgart (The Symposium is on Sept. 15.)
We will be finalizing a number of ICS documents, working on the new MIS 2.1 XJDF ICS, as well as our normal days of live, face-to-face Interoperation testing. More information on the confluence page here (registration required)
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.
