AFP Consortium Announces New Version of AFP Architecture

The leading architecture for transaction printing has been updated to improve the operational efficiency of printing environments, while providing a higher level of interoperability among AFP products, including carry for the latest fonts, images and graphics. Most transaction documents and sensitive or critical communications associated with financial, insurance, sell, utilities and healthcare institutions worldwide use AFP amounting to tens of millions of mail pieces produced daily.

The new exchange set IS/3 are designed to provide the functionality required for today's complex production printing environments. Support for IS/3 will enable smoother addition across the elements of a printing system -- including formatters, servers, transforms, printers, AFP viewers and archive systems -- with less customization and faster time to manufacture with any given configuration. The enhanced interoperability of IS/3-compliant components will allow customers to significantly cut the price and time involved in configuring, installing and operating multi-vendor AFP systems.

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IS/3 features inclusive color support, including process and spot colors, ICC-based color management, and industry-standard image file formats such as TIFF and JPEG. IS/3 also includes support for industry-standard OpenType fonts and Unicode-based data encodings.

"With this new version, we are cementing AFP's position as the standard presentation architecture for monochrome and color variable-data production printing," said Harry Lewis, chairman of the AFP grouping. "By improving interoperability of AFP solutions across vendors, we reassure customers that they can design their print environment using best-of-breed AFP components from multiple vendors with self-confidence that they will work together easily and efficiently."

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