Why AFP?

First and most importantly, what is AFP? I started in this business back in 1984 when AFP was Advanced Function Printing now I would lean towards Presentation. This would be two different ways to define AFP.

Today, printing has come a long way. With the ability to post application data to a Web Site or send it via email, printing can become a new way to present information.

AFP as a software architecture is implemented in the device-independent AFP data stream. AFP as a hardware architecture is implemented in the device-dependent IPDS data stream. Most importantly it is designed for system-managed printing, where all of the managing of the print process is tracked and controlled  so that every spooled file prints completely and accurately, every time. Itis implemented in software and hardware products that you can get from IBM and other vendors that take advantage of the AFP benefits.

What's advanced about Advanced Function Printing/Presentation?

The hardware and software architecture is integrated among applications, operating systems, and printers. This means you get a total print solution, where all the pieces are designed to work together.

AFP is integrated into IBM Mainframes and Distributed Systems like the AS/400, where each release is built with printer file and document management, plus print management via PSF on the various platforms.

Error recovery is built in to the IPDS data stream.
This is bidirectional so that software and the printer can have conversations. An IPDS printer knows when it has an error like a paper jam and the printer can tell AFP enabled software about it. The software can then take appropriate action: notify the sender, re-route the print job, etc.

External document formatting is built in to the AFP data stream. The formatting of a document can be independent of the application that produces it, and the printer that prints it. This means you can get better looking print output without changing the application that produces the print data.

AFP is the cornerstone for document management applications like print - and-view, archive/retrieve, and COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk). Today, output can be exported in PDF so that it can be portable for viewing and printing.

AFP products embrace industry standards. For example, compressed images use standard ITU -TSS T.6 Group 4 decompression. PSF sends standard data streams like SCS, PostScript, IPDS, line data, and AFP print files, plus GIF and BMP images-- across TCP/IP networks to IPDS printers. Or, AFP documents can be converted and sent to ASCII printers.

To use advanced function printing (AFP) support on any of the IBM System Server, PSF must be installed. However, if the ASCII data stream is converted through various Transform function built into the operating systems or with optional products, you can use the AFP support without having to install the PSF.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Tags: Print Architecture

Advanced Function Printing (AFP) is a document format originally defined by IBM to drive its printers and support the typical form printing on laser printers.
Short for Advanced Function Presentation, IBM's AFP platform is a published standard in the print industry for printing variable data at very high speeds with complete integrity. AFP incorporates other industry formats, including EPS, PDF, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, XML, XSL, PostScript, PCL and PPML.to cover the entire range of text, image, graphics, process color, highlight color and monochrome printing. AFP has the capability to print on standard printing device and deliver content via HTML, fax, e-mail or screen.
The original tool to produce this format and to drive the IBM printers was the so called PSF (Print Service Facility), which is still until today found in IBM mainframes. It is driven by the input data to be printed as well as the definitions on how to place the data on the page, the so called PAGEDEF and FORMDEF. This service also allowed to have electronic forms to print on, named OVERLAYS.
PSF is not only able to format the documents, but also to drive AFP or, more precisely, IPDS printers. IPDS stands for Intelligent Print Data Stream. It is a bidirectional format where the software is constantly in control of the printer and knows at all times the status of the pages sent to the printer, making it convenient for high volume production printers, that print 100 pages or more within a minute.
IBM also offered the PSF software to drive the IPDS printers using the AFP format not only on the mainframe, but on all of the their platforms, so there were PSF/390 (for the OS/390 mainframe), PSF/6000 (for the RS/6000 AIX9), PSF/400 (for the AS/400) and PSF/2 running under OS/2. Unfortunately, all of these behaved slightly differently, and IBM renamed PSF then into InfoPrint Manager.
Included with the PSF tools is ACIF (AFP Conversion and Indexing Facility) that allows to produce the AFP documents as a file in order to keep them and print them later, as well as adding and index to the document, very similar to Bookmarks in PDF, used for archiving purposes.
AFP originates in the mid 1980s, when storage space was still an expensive commodity, so it was designed to be very small, which is why still today it is a very popular format to manage high volumes of documents, such as in banking, telecommunication and insurance companies. The format originates from the MVS environment, so it typically uses the EBCDIC based codepages. As with all page description languages (like PostScript, PDF, and PCL), it is necessary to use a viewer in order to display the pages.
One of the more notable features of AFP printers is that output data can be placed at any addressable point on a page. This capability is called all points addressability (APA). APA gives AFP prints the freedom to create output anywhere on a page, as opposed to being limited to just line and character positions.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Tags: Print Architecture