Talk:Advanced Function Presentation

Advanced Function Printing OR Advanced Function Presentation
I found resources on the web saying AFP is Advanced Function Printing and AFP is Advanced Function Presentation. Probably a renaming issue or something. Does anyone know about this change/incompatibility between definitions?


 * Advanced Function Printing was the original term applied by IBM. When new methods to distribute and use the output were added over the years (such as the Internet, on-line viewing, etc.), AFP was renamed to Advanced Function Presentation.

Merge the two articles ? I've linked both on the AFP page ... --87.194.174.252 (talk) 11:25, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Agree. They're two names for the same thing. Peter Flass (talk) 22:01, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

IBM's sale of half of its printing systems company to Ricoh
Earlier this year, IBM sold half of its printing systems division to Ricoh to create a joint company - Infoprint Solutions. Additionally, future development for AFP specifications were turned over earlier to the AFP Color Consortium, an industry group that renamed itself to AFP Consortium.

Perhaps should be added to the article.

Afppro2 06:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * How do I correct this information? IBM sold all of PSD to Ricoh.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.237.81.65 (talk) 18:15, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

There are two articles on AFP (Advanced Function Presentation or Printing). The initial article (IBM Advanced Function Printing) is now quite dated. AFP is no longer owned by IBM. The Advanced Function Presentation article is much more current, complete and objective, and includes the basic citations to the AFP standards documentation and the AFP Consortium web site. To reduce confusion, these two articles should be merged under the the newer title. Hydraht (talk) 19:02, 21 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Does having the AFP Consortium mean that AFP is becoming an OPEN standard like HTML? Jimj wpg (talk) 22:43, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Merge (or redirect) done
Per the above request, I simply redirect the Advanced function printing article to this one as I don't have the knowledge or skills to update it. I have reproduced the text from that article below in case anyone can see a way to improve this article with it. AIR corn (talk) 06:09, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

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.

The original tool to produce this format and to drive the IBM printers was the so called PSF (Print Service Facility), which is still found in IBM mainframes today. 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.


 * Thanks. I merged back all the text above except the first sentence.  I added subheadings to the article to organize it a bit, wikified the references to the AFP Consortium, and made a few minor wording changes, but the article still needs a lot of work. Peter Flass (talk) 13:26, 18 October 2012 (UTC)