Advanced Function Presentation™ (AFP™) is an architecture-based system of hardware and software for creating, formatting, viewing, retrieving, printing, and distributing information on a wide variety of printer and display devices. It is the original, integrated data stream on the iSeries for generating fully composed pages of data. Traditional line-mode print applications compose a line at a time down the page (typically continuous form pages), whereas AFP composes the entire page before printing. In AFP, page elements such as text, images, bar codes, page segments, and overlays, can be specified in any order at any position in the page. This is called all points addressability.
Advanced Function Presentation data stream (AFPDS) is a printer-independent data stream that composes full pages within a document. Many of the page elements you can use with AFP are special objects called resources.
AFPDS
AFPDS files can be generated on the iSeries server as well as many other platforms. These operating systems can send AFPDS files to each other for printing on AFP-configured printers.
PSF
Print Services Facility™ (PSF) combines print data with resources to manage and control data transmitted to AFP printers. PSF accepts various data streams, transforms these data streams into the data stream required by each printer, and then transmits the data to the printer. PSF uses processing and printing options specified by the user and the installation during these processes. In addition, PSF does the following:
To use AFP support on the iSeries server, typically PSF must be installed. However, if the ASCII data stream is converted through Host Print Transform, you can use the AFP support without installing PSF.
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