IFRA Track started in the mid 90s as a research project at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) and IFRA (now WAN-IFRA) in order to foster the communication between global production management and tracking systems and the numerous production devices in the field, mainly for recorders an plate making devices, press and mailroom.

The first installations were based on IMF (IFRA Message Format) and an object model, which is still the basis of the later versions of IFRA Track. For historic reason you may have a look at the IFRA Special Reports 6.21.1 or 6.21.2.

In 2002 IFRA Track has entered the new media age with its version 3.0 which was converted to XML. Since then it was admired due its ease of use and its flexibility to adopt to nearly all workflows. There are numerous installations of IFRA Track world-wide today.

In times of the JDF hype there was the vision to cover all workflows in the printing industry – from production planning to delivery – using a single data format. At a first glance this approach has looked very desirable, however it never prevailed in the newspaper industry. IFRA Track 3.0 was developed in cooperation with CIP4 and JDF takes care to carry IFRA Track messages as well.