Methods and apparatus for substantially automatically generating a device capabilities file for a device in a printing environment. Features and aspects hereof provide for providing an XML schema (XMLS) file representing the available features of the device and then substantially automatically generating a device capabilities file from the XMLS file. The XMLS file may be substantially automatically generated by appropriate computing tools based on provided JDF job tickets for the device or may be generated by any other means and provided for generation of the device capabilities file. The device capabilities file may be generated by parsing the hierarchical tree structured XMLS file to identify attributes and elements therein. Each attribute is then translated to a corresponding device capabilities entry representing the available features of the device and setting values for each feature to generate the device capabilities file.