A Tool for Testing Compliance with CIP4’s Interoperability Conformance Specifications

Job Definition Format (JDF) is a relatively young industry standard developed by The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4). JDF specifies a data format for describing print jobs and exchanging production information between systems in the print production workflow. Most vendors in the printing industry today offer “JDF-enabled” products, but the industry lacks a well-defined test protocol and specialized tools for testing and verifying the level of JDF-compliance that products have. This paper presents an open source test tool for testing the level of JDF compliance as specified by the CIP4 organization’s Interoperability Conformance Specification (ICS) documents. The test tool is semiautomated and validates system behavior and output of JDF instances and JMF messages both syntactically and based on context.