DRUPA 2000--CIP3 Developments

BY CLINT BOLTE

Representatives of the 43 member companies of the International Cooperation for Integration of Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP3)—two companies joined during DRUPA—used this international venue as another opportunity to meet and discuss the evolving status of their efforts to develop integrated production standards leading to computer integrated manufacturing (CIM).

Increasing anticipation in this meeting was evident due to two developments: the fourth "P" for Process to represent the new Job Definition Format (JDF), as well as the potential juggernaut of JDF versus printCafe's PCX specifications.

Forged by Adobe, Agfa, MAN Roland and Heidelberg beginning nearly a year and a half ago, the JDF initiative is an XML-based print workflow specification framework for the integration of business and management information. The JDF/PDF (portable document format) print supply chain is comprised of four distinct areas: (1) create/ author by interagency, department or outsource; (2) assemble by corp-orate design or publisher; (3) management by supply chain or electronic commerce intermediary; and (4) print production. JDF is intended to be a new standard, considered to be an extension of the print production format (PPF) for CIP3; a facilitater of the integration of all processes (business, management and production) within a fully automated workflow; and therefore, an enabler for CIM.

A closed meeting of the CIP3 vendors was held May 23 at DRUPA to consider the cooperative's next tasks and time lines. The group voted to begin the integration of the JDF specifications into CIP3. A white paper detailing JDF and the draft of JDF specifications were prepared just before the trade show opened. These can be downloaded from www.job-definition-format.org.

The consortium wants feedback from the international print and vendor community to these draft specifications. They hope to have a spec. 1.0 prepared and announced at Seybold San Francisco in August. This will then be submitted to an international standards body for the approvals process.

Shortly before DRUPA, printCafe announced its PCX specification. This interface details how to build XML and other Internet-based data streams to exchange information through printCafe's customer-branded Websites. Bill Guttman, chairman and CEO of printCafe, depicted the PCX interface by a series of interconnected circles, as displayed in the diagram above.

The three companies—CreoScitex, Komori and MAN Roland—are currently listed as members of both CIP3 and printCafe and, therefore, might help minimize the potential divergence of JDF and PCX.

The administration and some technical consulting work for CIP3 is being provided by the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD) out of Darmstadt, Germany. The home page (www.cip3.org), for example, is maintained by IGD. Mark Schwarz, IGD consultant, said that they were pleased to have identified at least 25 products at DRUPA 2000 that were advertised to be CIP3 PPF compatible.

CIP3's promise of embedding complete information for and about a job into its digital workflow, concurrently to improve productivity and lower costs, is perhaps more feasible than practical at this stage. For example, Muller Martini reports that a number of customers purchasing new saddle stitchers have initially chosen not to incur the 20 percent investment premium required for their auto makeready system (AMRYS), which is CIP3 compatible. AMRYS, originally introduced at DRUPA 1995, will reduce the typical 30 minute manual makeready to three minutes.

While CIP3 might become CIP4 with JDF, John Werner, publisher of Graphic Communications World, suggested tongue-in-cheek that in order for the industry to realize the full benefit, "CIP3's fifth 'P' might be Perseverence."