Fall 2020 AFP Consortium Meeting Recap: Members Continue Building Architecture’s Forward Progress through Virtual Meeting
By Jack Condon
With the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, we were unable to meet face to face in England as we had originally planned. As a result, we held only one AFP Consortium meeting during 2020. Taking place in the Fall, the meeting consisted of a series of virtual sessions. Everyone did their best to keep AFP moving forward under difficult circumstances, and, all told, we had great attendance and participation. I want to thank everyone who contributed to this very successful meeting!
Here’s some of what we worked on:
Here’s some of what we worked on:
- QR Code with Image – Bringing this capability into AFP would help the architecture reliably produce, among other things, barcodes associated with financial payments, such as the Swiss QR Code and the Scan2Pay barcode. There are many technicalities to consider, and we naturally want to get this exactly right.
- Overprint – In our last meeting recap, AFP Overprint was the subject of seven architecture change requests (ACRs). Now, all of these are at Consensus status, and the Overprint solution is ready for implementation. AFP Overprint allows multiple colors to be printed on top of each other at the same point on a page without “knocking out” any existing color that is already present.
- Metadata Tagging – Another long-term effort took a significant step at this meeting, with the Metadata Guide for AFP document being voted to Verify status by the Consortium, putting this one step closer to final publication. While AFP has supported Metadata Objects for many years, the purpose of this Guide is to provide a well-defined tagging schema for carrying AFP tagging information within a Metadata Object. Metadata tagging brings with a variety of benefits, such as meeting the requirements of universal accessibility (UA). Metadata tagging helps associate extra information with a given part of an AFP document, allowing users with vision impairments or other restrictions to make full use of the content provided by an AFP system. It can also help an automated archive system to provide a more comprehensive index of the data in an archived AFP file, creating additional transparency and opening the door to new efficiencies as a result.
- New ACRs were discussed to allow RGB images with transparency masks to be included in AFP. In addition, support of the Aztec Code bar code (an especially efficient 2D bar code) was also reviewed.
- Updates to the IANA Media Type Registry – In addition to the nine AFP Media types now defined, we reviewed proposed new AFP Media Types in support of Color Managed Resources and Color Tables for submission to the IANA AFP Media Type Registry.
- New Observer Membership – Yves Bougardier (the founder and CEO of ybam), attended the meeting as a prospective Observer member. The Observer membership level was created last year as a way for AFP consultants and educators to participate in the ongoing evolution of AFP. Since this meeting, Yves has been accepted and approved by the Consortium as our newest Observer member. You can learn more about Yves and his relationship with AFP here.
