A method and program for a universal Job Description Format (JDF) printer driver. The universal JDF printer driver computer software program product has a computer readable program code embedded in a computer usable storage medium for controlling a data processing apparatus, where the program code is configured to cause the data processing apparatus to execute a process for generating a JDF job ticket for printing documents by a JDF compatible printing device. The process implemented by the universal JDF printer driver has the steps of obtaining device capabilities information from the JDF compatible printing device and creating a baseline JDF job ticket based on the device capabilities information, providing a graphical user interface to allow a user to modify the baseline JDF job ticket interactively, and generating a syntactically and semantically correct final JDF job ticket compatible with the device capabilities of the JDF compatible printing device.