Keebler
New member
I was incredibly excited to stumble on the recent "JDF for beginners" thread - I've been searching the web for articles on JDF (with very little success) for the better part of a year. What I seek is "JDF for the coder", which doesn't seem to exist as far as I can tell (neither virtually nor in a book). I have the 13-webinar series from CIP4 which does little to lift the veil, and everything out there seems to be focused on explaining it to business owners rather than someone looking to do something practical with it. From reading the previous thread, maybe this is because it's simply so complicated it's useless to understand from a coding perspective. Maybe.
Here's what I know: JDF is an implementation of XML Schema which is an implmentation of XML. I'm familiar with XML, have the O'Reilly book on XML schema next to me, and I've downloaded all the official JDF specs and schema. Doesn't help me with much other that preparing for a nap, frankly. It's completely impractical to approach from this angle as far as I can tell.
If anyone could look over this and offer their opinion of A) whether it's too ridiculous to pursue and B) where I can look for more practical examples of JDF, I'd really appreciate it. I'm no brilliant programmer, and I have no ambition to write a universal JDF app. My goal is to be able to dynamically author a fairly specific JDF document with minimal variables to talk to a single printer and get basic feedback.
I have coded (PHP) a system that creates print-ready, imposed PDFs of business cards (and other products) on the fly from web-based user input. I want to be able to log in and hit a button and have them pop out of the printer without downloading them and opening Acrobat. I know, crazy.
We're using an IKON CPP 650. I need to tell it quantity, duplexing, stock, and select color settings (I'd settle for just getting it to print without specifying any of that to start). My problem is two-fold: how do I talk to the printer (over http?) and what's the minimum JDF/JMF file I need to send it? Maybe step one is just to say "hello" to the printer with JMF and get it to say "hello, I'm on" back?
Thanks for any help As I said it's been a long journey just to find a place that someone's even talking about practical JDF.
Edited by: Lincoln Russell on Jun 16, 2008 12:02 PM
Here's what I know: JDF is an implementation of XML Schema which is an implmentation of XML. I'm familiar with XML, have the O'Reilly book on XML schema next to me, and I've downloaded all the official JDF specs and schema. Doesn't help me with much other that preparing for a nap, frankly. It's completely impractical to approach from this angle as far as I can tell.
If anyone could look over this and offer their opinion of A) whether it's too ridiculous to pursue and B) where I can look for more practical examples of JDF, I'd really appreciate it. I'm no brilliant programmer, and I have no ambition to write a universal JDF app. My goal is to be able to dynamically author a fairly specific JDF document with minimal variables to talk to a single printer and get basic feedback.
I have coded (PHP) a system that creates print-ready, imposed PDFs of business cards (and other products) on the fly from web-based user input. I want to be able to log in and hit a button and have them pop out of the printer without downloading them and opening Acrobat. I know, crazy.
We're using an IKON CPP 650. I need to tell it quantity, duplexing, stock, and select color settings (I'd settle for just getting it to print without specifying any of that to start). My problem is two-fold: how do I talk to the printer (over http?) and what's the minimum JDF/JMF file I need to send it? Maybe step one is just to say "hello" to the printer with JMF and get it to say "hello, I'm on" back?
Thanks for any help As I said it's been a long journey just to find a place that someone's even talking about practical JDF.
Edited by: Lincoln Russell on Jun 16, 2008 12:02 PM