The Automated Document Factory (ADF) concept was first published by Gartner Inc. in 1996. Developed and refined by Jay Ingalls and others within Gartner, ADF is a strategy for creating and delivering any company's mission-critical, high-volume printed documents.

The ADF concept provided a strategy to efficiently and cost-effectively produce internal and external printed transaction documents. Gartner encouraged the use of factory production techniques to ensure lower costs, higher quality, document integrity and process controls. In time, equipment and software suppliers developed the tools to facilitate the ADF's integrated production workflow.

ADF quickly became universally accepted as early adopters collaborated with suppliers to develop, implement and refine the necessary tools to make ADF a reality.

Source: Wikipedia

top

Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) is an IBM architecture and family of associated printer software and hardware that provides document and information presentation control independent of specific applications and devices.

Using AFP, users can control formatting, the form of paper output, whether a document is to be printed or viewed online, and manage document storage and access in a distributed network across multiple operating system platforms. AFP is primarily used in large enterprises with printer rooms and expensive high-speed printers.

AFP applications allow users or print room operators to distribute print jobs among a group of printers and to designate backup printers when one fails. IBM considers AFP to be a "cornerstone" of EDM applications such as print-and-view, archive and retrieval, and Computer Output to Laser Disk (COLD).

AFP consists of:
- MO:DCA-P (Mixed Object:Document Content Architecture-Presentation), the Page Description Language fileformat that describes the text and graphics on a page. The 'Mixed Object' moniker refers to the fact that AFPDS can contain multiple types of objects, including text, images and even objects marked as 'barcodes'. An application can simply include a string of digits marked as a specific type of barcode, and the rendering of bars will be done on the output platform (physical printer hardware or software emulation). AFPDS is comparable to PDF or PostScript, though PostScript can also include job specific information that drives printer options such as input tray selection.

- IPDS Intelligent Printer Data Stream. This is the bi-directional protocol used between the host and the printer. It is used to send the pagelevel data (AFPDS) and to signal errors and completion of jobs, as well as to query a printers available resources (e.g. available memory, input trays, etc.) It's comparable to protocols like Internet Printing Protocol.

MO:DCA-P is sometimes called AFPDS (AFP Data Stream). Some MO:DCA-P "objects" are IOCA, GOCA and BCOCA; Image-, Graphics- and Bar Code- Object Content Architecture.

Source: Wikipedia

top

AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is the name given to a series of proprietary operating systems sold by IBM for several of its computer system platforms, based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible command and programming interface extensions.

The AIX 5L 5.3 release supports up to 64 IBM POWER or PowerPC architecture central processing units and two terabytes (TB) of random access memory. The JFS2 file system - first introduced by IBM as part of AIX - supports computer files and partitions over 16 TB in size (though that's the tested limit and recommended maximum).

Source: Wikipedia

top

An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.[1] Advanced programming interface is a near synonym with wider application that predates the current common usage. In the original term the concept is meant to represent any well defined interface between two separate programs. The main difference is that this older term does not inculcate a parent-child relationship and can therefore be applied to peer-to-peer situations more logically, e.g. internal kernel services which can present themselves as separate programs.

Source: Wikipedia

top

The IBM System i (formerly known as iSeries, AS/400, and Application System/400) is a minicomputer platform produced by IBM. It was officially introduced as the AS/400 in 1988. It was then renamed to the eServer iSeries in 2000 as part of IBM's e-Server branding initiative. In 2006, the platform has once again been renamed to System i.

Source: Wikipedia

top

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings — which support many more characters than did the original — have a historical basis in ASCII.

Work on ASCII began in 1960. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963,[1] a major revision in 1967, and the most recent update in 1986. It currently defines codes for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed, and 95 are printable characters.

Source: Wikipedia