AFP - Advanced Function Printing

AFP is used on IBM Mainframes for page printers. It is an architected presentation function set of the Mixed Object Document Content Architecture (MO:DCA), which is part of IBM’s System Application Architecture.

You don’t actually print with AFP. MO:DCA, IPDS (Intelligent Printer Data Stream) and other is used for printing. The information we have may be out of date, but it used to contain PTOCA (Print Text Object Content Architecture), GOCA (Graphic Object Content Architecture), IOCA (Image Object Content Architecture) as well as some other, non-SAA descriptors (simple image, for example).

IPDS is IBM’s SAA printing language. It handles a variety of bit-mapped fonts, simple graphics primitives, and bit-mapped images. Because of the simplicity of the imaging model, it can be used to drive high speed laser printers.

• An architecture that defines the interchange of data.
• A collection of products to manage your information.
  • Products for creating, indexing, viewing, distributing, and printing information.
  • A way to distribute information directly to the people who need it, who then use the information in whatever format is best.
  • A way to immediately enhance your line-printing applications and improve the print quality of your text and graphics applications.
• The solution for your information-presentation needs.

See also MO:DCA (IBM Mixed Object Document Content Architecture-Presentation)

• AFP Consortium (AFPC)
• AFP Explorer
  This program helps when doing low-level AFP development. It lists all structured fields and values. Also it has the ability to render objects, and a built-in hex-editor.
• WinAFP
  A tool to inspect AFP files and to manually modify them. Content folding allows to quickly scan through large files. It runs on Microsoft Windows.
• BTB Browser
  Another AFP viewer which is probably better suited for preview than IBM’s tools as it doesn’t replace bitmap fonts with platform fonts. It also has a good AFP decoder useful for debugging.

• afp-l discussion list
  This discussion group covers hardware and software issues connected with IBM’s Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture. The discussion group consists of product users and is not associated with IBM.