CIP4 gets its act together – new industry standard.

The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4) has completed its registration as a Swiss organisation and will be headquartered in Zurich. It will operate as an international standards body and develop new independent file format standards for the printing industry, such as the Job Definition Format (JDF).

The move is a development of the CIP3 initiative that began in 1995 to develop file format standards. Since then CIP3 has developed Print Production Format (PPF) which is today implemented in many applications.

Agfa, Adobe, Man Roland and Heidelberg, the original members of CIP3, will formally hand over their rights to the industry standard to the new CIP4 organisation which has 72 members encompassing most of the major suppliers and industry associations. There is no Australian involvement as yet.

CIP4 will initially concentrate on further developing JDF, which will open up all production processes to a common specification language.

“CIP4 is an international standards body, which is about to involve even the users. This is most important since it ensures that JDF will always be close to practice. It’s the first time that computer integrated manufacturing has really got a chance to become a reality in our industry,” said Christian Anschütz, Heidelberg, member of the CIP4 Advisory Board.

The main features of JDF are:
• Ability to carry a print job from genesis through completion. This includes a detailed description of the creative, prepress, press, postpress and delivery processes.
• Ability to bridge the communication gap between production and Management Information Services. This ability enables instantaneous job and device tracking as well as detailed pre- and post-calculation of jobs in the graphic arts.
• Ability to bridge the gap between the customer’s view of product and the manufacturing process by defining a process independent product view as well as a process dependent production view of a print job.
• Ability to define and track any user defined workflow without constraints on the supported workflow models. This includes serial, parallel, overlapping and iterative processing in arbitrary combinations and over distributed locations.

For further information: http://www.cip4.org/