The New Print Production Mantra: Unified Offset/Digital Workflow

Deborah Cantabene, Vice President of Workflow Marketing at Xerox, echoes these sentiments. “Printers should be able to bring jobs into the offset print manage-ment system and manage them through without different prepress processes and different databases for different output devices.”

Enter JDF
Addressing this production dichotomy was one of the promises of CIP4 JDF, an initiative in 2001 that many NPES members are familiar with, as the Association played an active role in helping it get launched. Now, five years later, JDF-enabled products are making their way into the marketplace in growing num-bers and much work has been done within the vendor community to ensure that products can work together effectively to deliver more automation and more efficient workflows. An outgrowth of this is the ability to unify once-parallel offset and digital workflows.