Advanced Function Presentation (AFP)

What is AFP?
Advanced Function Presentation™ (AFP™) is the industry-leading architecture for mission-critical transaction printing. It provides an end-to-end presentation solution that supports centralized resource management and high print speeds. Output integrity is integrated into the base architecture using formally architected error detection, reporting, and recovery mechanisms.

AFP is an integrated hardware and software architecture. The software "layer" is a highly-structured, object-oriented page description language (PDL) called the Mixed Object Document Content Architecture™, or AFP Data Stream. The hardware "layer" is a bi-directional print protocol called the Intelligent Printer Data Stream™. Page content is described using either InfoPrint Solutions Company Object Content Architecture (OCA) data formats such as PTOCA (text), IOCA (image), GOCA (vector graphics), BCOCA™ (bar codes), or industry-standard formats such as EPS, PDF, TIFF, JFIF, GIF. The InfoPrint AFP Architecture is openly published, allowing many vendors to create compatible software and hardware.