A system enables a rendering intent to be specified for an object in a page description language that does not support the specifying of rendering intents. Such a system includes a user interface for receiving a rendering intent and an identification of an object associated with the received rendering intent, a page description language (PDL) file generator for generating a tag to associate the identified object with a PDL output parameter, and an encoder for encoding the received rendering intent in the PDL output parameter associated with the identified object. Such a system may be used, for example, with a PostScript or a PDF print job file.