AFP Consortium publishes new version of the Bar Code Object Content Architecture (BCOCA) Reference
BOULDER, Colo., December 17, 2025 – The Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) Consortium, an international consortium of print and presentation industry stakeholders working together to further enhance the AFP document architecture, is pleased to announce the availability of the twelfth edition of the Bar Code Object Content Architecture (BCOCA) Reference. The new reference includes the addition of the Han Xin Code bar code—a highly efficient 2D bar code designed to encode Chinese characters and support a wide range of other data types—as well as clarifications and editorial improvements that enhance consistency and readability.
As the leading bar code architecture for high-performance transaction printing, BCOCA describes and generates barcode symbols so they can be rendered consistently across different devices and production environments within AFP documents.
New in the twelfth edition of the BCOCA Reference is support for:
- Han Xin Code, a versatile 2D barcode that excels at encoding Chinese characters and is flexible enough to support most common data types. The symbology is standardized under ISO/IEC 20830:2021, which defines how the code must be generated and read for consistent, reliable use.
- A clarification that increases consistency between implementations when Data Matrix bar code sizes are chosen by the printer.
- Additional information and clarifications to improve readability.
For details, please refer to the BCOCA Reference, document number AFPC-0005-11, on the AFP Consortium website: https://www.afpconsortium.org/publications.html
About AFP and the AFP Consortium
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 used to produce mission critical documents such as bills, statements and policies and contains 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 over 30 companies committed to the continued development of the AFP architecture. Since 2004, the AFP Consortium 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, as well as many other functionalities. The AFP Consortium will continue in its role to grow and maintain the complete set of AFP architecture.
For more information, visit the AFP Consortium website: https://www.afpconsortium.org.
