PrintTalk® was originally a community formed by print management systems and e-commerce companies. Its initial goal was to define a “best practice” common and open communications interface between companies who buy printed products, and those who manufacture them. The resulting PrintTalk® implementation supports and extends use of the broadly published , Job Definition Format (JDF) or and XJDF standards and Commercial eXtensible Markup Language (cXML). The newest PrintTalk specification is recognized as integral to the XJDF standard. The PrintTalk® interface specification is distributed free of any license fees or royalties, in order to address the need for end-to-end connectivity in the printing industry.

In 2004, an agreement was reached between CIP4, PrintTalk and NPES for CIP4 to both host the PrintTalk specification and to assume its continued development, insuring seamless integration with current and evolving versions of JDF. This is an evolution of the close working relationship that has existed between CIP4 and PrintTalk since its inception.

PrintTalk Versions

PrintTalk is maintained in parallel with the respective JDF and XJDF specifications.

The final 1.x version is PrintTalk 1.5. PrintTalk 1.4 was skipped and no further JDF based versions of PrintTalk are anticipated.

PrintTalk 2.0 was the first version based on XJDF. It was replaced by PrintTalk 2.0.1, a minor bug fix release.

PrintTalk 2.1 is the latest version and includes a few enhancements compared to 2.0.

PrintTalk Specifications and Schema