AFP Consortium’s Fall 2018 Meeting Highlights: AFP Metadata, Color Overprinting, and ISO Certification Efforts
By Jack Condon
This past Fall, the AFP Consortium convened its 33rd meeting, where members provided status updates on ongoing projects and discussed ways forward for both the AFP platform and the AFP Consortium.
New capabilities in AFP must be as reliable and robust as what is available in the marketplace today. As a result, major additions can take time, as our working groups roll up their sleeves and make sure that these new capabilities will meet our customers’ needs. With this in mind, our September meeting carried over many threads from March 2018, as AFP metadata, color overprint, and ISO standardization “headlined” the four-day event.
On the metadata front, example use cases are being refined to validate the proposed tagging design. This will allow us to get a real-world sense of how metadata tagging interacts with AFP, and how we can make that interaction as seamless, effective and flexible as possible. This crucial step brings us that much closer to making natively tagged AFP a reality, bolstering accessibility and business intelligence efforts, among others.
At the same time, progress was made in enabling color overprint (printing one color over another) using AFP. This is a challenging area, but our members were excited to tackle it.
Meanwhile, work continues in the ISO/TC171 Document Management working group on the ISO 22550: AFP Interchange for PDF. While AFP has had the ability to include PDF in AFP object containers for many years, more users are creating these "hybrid" workflows. Documenting the AFP MO:DCA Interchange Set 3 (MO:DCA IS/3) and the MO:DCA GA (Graphic Arts) Function Set in the proposed ISO standard will give users confidence when creating AFP data streams that include PDF. Many thanks to those people who are part of the ISO review committees around the world for your help with this effort!
Thank you for reading! Keep an eye out for my next AFP Consortium meeting recap, after our April 2019 meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany.
New capabilities in AFP must be as reliable and robust as what is available in the marketplace today. As a result, major additions can take time, as our working groups roll up their sleeves and make sure that these new capabilities will meet our customers’ needs. With this in mind, our September meeting carried over many threads from March 2018, as AFP metadata, color overprint, and ISO standardization “headlined” the four-day event.
On the metadata front, example use cases are being refined to validate the proposed tagging design. This will allow us to get a real-world sense of how metadata tagging interacts with AFP, and how we can make that interaction as seamless, effective and flexible as possible. This crucial step brings us that much closer to making natively tagged AFP a reality, bolstering accessibility and business intelligence efforts, among others.
At the same time, progress was made in enabling color overprint (printing one color over another) using AFP. This is a challenging area, but our members were excited to tackle it.
Meanwhile, work continues in the ISO/TC171 Document Management working group on the ISO 22550: AFP Interchange for PDF. While AFP has had the ability to include PDF in AFP object containers for many years, more users are creating these "hybrid" workflows. Documenting the AFP MO:DCA Interchange Set 3 (MO:DCA IS/3) and the MO:DCA GA (Graphic Arts) Function Set in the proposed ISO standard will give users confidence when creating AFP data streams that include PDF. Many thanks to those people who are part of the ISO review committees around the world for your help with this effort!
Thank you for reading! Keep an eye out for my next AFP Consortium meeting recap, after our April 2019 meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany.
