Re: JDF for beginners
Hi Mark,
Thank you for the clarification. On the whole, I think we're on the same page. As I stated earlier in this thread, "JDF integration into a home-grown MIS is probably not the sort of thing you'd want to undertake without serious committment." Man years to develop? Non-trivial? Ambitious goals? All true.
I'm no expert on JDF, and know even less about the inner workings of CIP4. What I do know is programming. For what it's worth, I built my original computer from a kit back in 1978, learned Northstar Basic, then published the first computer-generated printing price list in America in 1980, a year before IBM introduced the PC. That and three dollars, as they say, will get you a doughnut and a cup of coffee. Maybe not even, anymore.
!http://www.printfire.com/Images/PL_1980.jpg!
Back then, every dot-matrix printer (lasers and ink-jets hadn't been invented yet) came with its own set of escape codes. If you wanted your program to work with printer A from manufacturer B, you had to write a driver for that. Remember, this was pre-DOS and pre-Microsoft. The good news was that somebody eventually published an escape code dictionary.
That, in a nutshell, is where I think we're currently at with JDF. For the new and over-hyped wunderkind to find a home in every print shop, it will need some sort of OS and the interface and drivers that go with it. You're more involved with JDF than I am. Is this something we can expect from CIP4?
As the architect of Morning Flight, I want to see JDF succeed . . . badly! But I expect that to happen without me having to return to the computer stone age to write escape codes (or nodes and references). I'm too far up in years to waste my time putting lipstick on a pig.
Hal Heindel
http://www.morningflight.com