BVDM and CIP4 publish new whitepaper

New XJDF white paper published

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 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 documents, not yet mentioned, are planned or already in progress.

Please, feel free to download our whitepaper XJDF - Building blocks for the "Printing Industry 4.0. It is aimed both at users in print shops and at software and interface developers in the supply industry.