BOULDER, Colo., January 5, 2016 – The Advanced Function Presentation Consortium(AFPC), an international consortium of print industry stakeholders working together to further enhance the Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) document architecture, is pleased to announce ISO publication of the AFP Archive (AFP/A) standard, which enables accurate long term preservation and faithful reproduction of original AFP jobs.
While independent AFP archival systems have existed for many years, the ISO technical committee for document management applications (TC171) embarked on ISO standardization of AFP/A in May 2012 with the help of the AFPC. Working within the ISO process, AFP/A was exposed to a broad range of international experts and leveraged insights from sources beyond the AFPC, including additional experts within the archivist community. The end result is a recognized level of integrity that will aid the format’s widespread adoption.
“This certification is a huge step for AFP and the AFP user community,” said Harry Lewis, President, AFPC. “Until the introduction of AFP/A, archival to an ISO-recognized format would require a transform to PDF. While PDF/A is great for archiving PDF content, there is always the chance of introducing some small fidelity issue in the transform. If the resulting archive is incomplete or inaccurate, then integrity may be compromised, limiting the archive’s usefulness. For the many users who run end-to-end AFP, the introduction of a fully realized, fully approved AFP/A format is a huge boon, providing increased efficiency and compliance with regulations that demand ISO-approved standards.”
The AFP Archive standard can be obtained by ordering from ISO as document ISO 18565:2015.
To find out more about the AFPC and its numerous standards, visit http://afpcinc.org/afp-publications/.
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About AFP and the AFPC
Advanced Function Presentation is a document architecture that offers performance, manageability and integrity benefits meeting the needs of large volume, variable data applications. AFP technology has historically been leveraged for the production of mission critical documents such as bills, statements and policies and contains within it methods for job ticketing, effective server-based resource management and the powerful Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) for total output integrity. In addition to being a rich, self-contained native document language, AFP is also a powerful container architecture capable of bringing full resource and production management capabilities to bear on encapsulated formats such as PDF and TIFF.
The AFP Consortium is an international open standards body consisting of 30 companies committed to the continued development of the AFP architecture. Since 2004, the AFPC has developed open standards for accurate and consistent ICC-based color management, high-speed complex text, page group recovery within high-volume production, the IS/3 interchange set for compliance, and metadata support for AFP Archive and future applications, such as accessibility features. The AFPC will continue in its role to grow and maintain the complete set of AFP architecture.
To see a full list of the Consortium's members and learn more about the AFP Consortium and the new IS/3 AFP interchange set, visit the AFPC website http://www.afpcinc.org.
