THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF ADVANCED FUNCTION PRINTING

Advanced Function Printing(TM) (AFP(TM)) has become one of the de facto printing standards. It is a broad architecture to support printing across an entire enterprise and encompasses IBM architectures as well as industry standards. AFP had its beginnings in the IBM System/370(TM) environment in 1984 and has since expanded to include midrange and local area network systems. Recently the capabilities of AFP have been extended beyond printing to include on-line viewing and management of presentation data. An overview of AFP capabilities was given in an earlier issue of the IBM Systems Journal. This paper traces the continuing evolution of AFP and its usage and how it is addressing the presentation requirements of businesses in the 1990s.