AFP as an input resource

[DSweet]

I'm being asked to submit this to the Forum...one of our customers (a rather major one) is submitting an AFP file to us which is ready to go for most printers...except ours. The AFP file is the only way that this client wants to give us the file (in reality I think it's more like it's the only way they CAN do it because it was done this way in the past and nobody there understands any other way of re-doing it).

 

Within this AFP file is a print stream of 10's of thousands of individual applications that can range from being only 1 page to up to as many as 6 pages per individual record. One of our programmers has jury-rigged a number of different 3rd party programs together to convert this file into PCL, then using perl scripts and other such magic scripts extracts the address data from each application to feed into our BCC Mailing System to generate our mail data forms for the Post Office. Then we need to split the printstreams into all the single page, all the 2 pages, the 3 pages, and so on. Please don't ask me why...I'm just the one that is submitting the question.

 

Personally I have not used AFP files at all, but I am told that fonts are added at the first occurrence of it in the file. So if the font is defined on page 1 and you try to read in page 105, then that font is not loaded. Again this is what I am informed happens.

 

I would like to know if since FusionPro can now output an AFP file as a composition stream, can FusionPro now understand an AFP file as an input resource? And if so, how would I reference the different pages of the document? Would it be like using a ".pagenumber=xx" command when referencing a specific page in a PDF resource? Or is there a different method that is not documented?

 

Sorry for being rather long winded on this one.

.

[Dan Korn]

I'm being asked to submit this to the Forum...one of our customers (a rather major one) is submitting an AFP file to us which is ready to go for most printers...except ours. The AFP file is the only way that this client wants to give us the file (in reality I think it's more like it's the only way they CAN do it because it was done this way in the past and nobody there understands any other way of re-doing it).

 

Within this AFP file is a print stream of 10's of thousands of individual applications that can range from being only 1 page to up to as many as 6 pages per individual record. One of our programmers has jury-rigged a number of different 3rd party programs together to convert this file into PCL, then using perl scripts and other such magic scripts extracts the address data from each application to feed into our BCC Mailing System to generate our mail data forms for the Post Office. Then we need to split the printstreams into all the single page, all the 2 pages, the 3 pages, and so on. Please don't ask me why...I'm just the one that is submitting the question.

 

Personally I have not used AFP files at all, but I am told that fonts are added at the first occurrence of it in the file. So if the font is defined on page 1 and you try to read in page 105, then that font is not loaded. Again this is what I am informed happens.

 

I would like to know if since FusionPro can now output an AFP file as a composition stream, can FusionPro now understand an AFP file as an input resource? And if so, how would I reference the different pages of the document? Would it be like using a ".pagenumber=xx" command when referencing a specific page in a PDF resource? Or is there a different method that is not documented?

 

Sorry for being rather long winded on this one.

.

No, AFP is output only. It's not impossible that we could come up with some kind of enhancement to FusionPro to process the AFP files, but it would almost certainly be custom engineering, as I can't imagine there's a great demand for this functionality out there. Also, the way that the fonts are embedded into AFP makes them extremely difficult to "crack" and convert back into True Type or PostScript fonts that any other output format could utilize. So it would be a complex custom engineering project, which would probably be on the expensive side. But if you're interested, contact me off-line and I can forward it up the chain here.