Fall 2025 AFP Consortium Meeting Recap: Security updates coming soon, New page placement option introduced


by Dennis Carney, President, AFP Consortium
November 26, 2025

In September 2025, AFP Consortium members gathered for the 2025 AFP Consortium Fall Meeting hosted by RISO in Lyon, France. Once again, attendees impressed me with their enthusiasm for the AFP architectures and their expert opinions and ideas.  It is an enjoyable experience for me to lead such a talented group.
 
Our Spring 2026 meeting will be hosted by Ricoh in Boulder, Colorado. We hope to see many AFP Consortium members in attendance to continue progressing this important technology!
 
Meanwhile, here are some highlights from our Fall meeting:

  • Review of a proposed official AFP Consortium recommendation to use TLS to encrypt the IPDS communication between the host and the printer. The document will be posted soon and will provide "in transit" encryption for the IPDS stream.
  • More exciting security news, with significant reported implementation activity of new architecture to allow customers to encrypt and protect objects in AFP, including text, images, graphics, barcodes, object containers, and metadata. This new architecture can now progress toward becoming an official part of the AFP definition, providing "at rest" encryption for sensitive data objects in both MO:DCA and IPDS.
  • New proposed architecture that adds a method to place pages on a sheet that provides more flexibility and functionality than the current N-up support, and yet is more straightforward to understand.
  • Discussion of ways to increase promotion and education about AFP, to ensure those in the printing industry are aware of the incredible value of AFP in enabling secure, reliable, and blazingly-fast printing workflows.
 
Other topics of note are:

  • New proposed architecture to enable the host to pass non-ASCII job names to be displayed on the printer console.
  • Review of a draft new BCOCA Reference, with plans to publish in late 2025.
  • Three informative short videos that extol the value of AFP are now available on our website. Please feel free to share these videos to explain AFP to others.
  • Review of the results of our AFP user survey. Thanks to everyone who responded! We would love to hear your opinion as well. The survey is available here.
 
A sad note: Mere days after the meeting ended, we learned of the passing of Yves Bougardier, a long-time AFP member. Many of you in the industry are likely familiar with Yves, who has been an important part of the printing industry, and especially the printing standards world, for many years, including his activity in the Ghent Workgroup. Yves attended this AFP Consortium meeting and provided not only his valuable thoughts during the meeting but also his charismatic and lively personality during our evening dinners.  We were shocked and dismayed to hear of his passing—he will be missed.
 
Until next time,
Dennis