Automating printing with JDF?

PrintingNewbie

New member
+For starters, please excuse my ignorance on this topic. I am not usually involved in printing matters in my company, but rather more general IT-related items.+

Right now in my company we have many people who submit documents for printing through our intranet. What happens, is they visit a page, upload their document (a Word doc, a PDF, an image, etc.) and fill out fields like number of copies, whether they want it stapled, and so on. This information is stored in a database on the server. There is also an administrative component that allows my boss to view the pending print jobs. To print these out, he has to download the document specified by the user, load it, and print it directly to the printer, specifying the number of copies, the staple options, and so on.

In any event, he's heard that this can be automated via JDF. That instead of him having to log onto the system and manually print the document, a submitted PDF could have accompanying JDF instructions embedded and sent directly to the printer. Is this understanding correct?

I come from the development side of things, so I am interested in what development tools exist so that I can have the intranet application automatically generate the associated JDF and send it to the printer. In my preliminary research it appears that there are open-source libraries for JDF in Java, but I am using Microsoft technologies.

Sorry for the beginner/newbie question. Any advice or suggestions or resources to check out are greatly appreciated. I've done a couple of hours of research on the CIP4 website and poking through www.adobe.com, but have found little in the way of material directed at developers and focuses on printing simple jobs. Most of the material is high-level and examines enterprise-level workflow topics.

Thanks
 

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