In recent years, we’ve all been deluged with computer industry acronyms.

To many of us, this alphabet soup represents a foreign language, rarely used within casual conversation, but often tossed about in technical discussions, freely and without definition. The resulting confusion can be mind-boggling, if not a bit humorous.

If you’re like many people (myself included), you gloss over these incidents, preferring not to appear ignorant or out of the loop.

With the advent of the job definition format, newspaper production managers and staffers have yet another acronym with which to become familiar.

Talk to me

In a nutshell, JDF is nothing more than a way for rival applications and systems to talk with one another.

Through this common language, business objects, resources and job specifications could be passed along, automatically and transparently.

Combined with cXML, or the commercial eXtensible Markup Language, JDF is a core element of a specification developed by PrintTalk, a trade group whose core mission is to help companies do business electronically.

Think of JDF as the language used to transmit information about jobs from the front office to the plant floor. Then think of PrintTalk as the front-end to that, so that data from vendors, buyers and other outside sources can communicate with the front office.

Newspapers next

While all of this was initially designed for the commercial printing industry, provisions have been made to include the publishing and newspaper industries as well. To wrap your brain around the size and flexibility of JDF and PrintTalk, the specification amounts to more than 500 pages of text. It’s a highly comprehensive and flexible guideline.

JDF was first released in April 2001 by CIP4, or the International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress, a Swiss-based standards body comprised of such printing industry heavyweights as Adobe Systems Inc., MAN Roland Inc., Heidelberg, Agfa Corp. and many others.

CIP4 is an outgrowth of CIP3, which has been working since 1995 to craft standards and guidelines governing the automation of printing processes.

Why is JDF important to you? If you were to dial the Wayback Machine to the early 1980s and review how desktop publishing impacted typesetting, you begin to remember the road we’d all prefer not to venture down again.

Desktop publishing emerged in a variety of competing formats, bereft of standards. Integration with existing in-house and external systems was nearly impossible. File formats were all over the board, systems were expensive and as technologies were orphaned due to the lack of communication capabilities, many users found themselves simply out of luck.

How will this affect the newspaper industry? Imagine your plant as it exists today. Most production facilities enjoy some level of automation, but current systems rarely have the ability to talk with one another. The result: islands of automation, each of which may improve your production process, but which lack the means to mesh with rival and disparate systems to improve workflow. The best bridge to span these islands? JDF.

It’s the only widely accepted specification available, and it’s robust enough for newspaper needs.

Future decisions

Your future buying decisions will soon be based upon the question: Is it JDF-compliant? Imagine purchasing a television set back in the 1970s, when the question was: “Is it cable-ready?” - regardless of whether or not you had cable services at the time. You simply wouldn’t want to buy into technology that led to a dead end.

JDF and PrintTalk are free to all - openly published and available for everyone to use. It may not be important for you to understand the intricacies of JDF, but knowing it exists and what it’s designed to do will benefit you tremendously in the future.

JDF is all about allowing systems, people and machinery to communicate freely and easily.