The road to an AFP product...

So my customer has a very large license from a European AFP software vendor. They've had this license for at least 10 years and they use it to do both original mailing work as well as "convert" jobs.

A converted job is a job where they receive a set of pages from a customer along with mailing data. The use their AFP software to create "mailing labels" that overprint the page's original mailing information with new, presorted information. The converted jobs are discussed more in my PDF Outsider blog.

The in-house composition jobs involve receiving customer logos that must be processed in AFP. Fortunately or unfortunately the logo data arrives as "traditional" Mac file formats such as Quark, Photoshop, etc. As a result these logos must be converted to AFP via a conversion tool. The tool provides several options to convert PDF and PostScript to an AFP "Page Segment" - which is basically an image.

This customer suffers with a number of peculiar problems. First of all there are various versions of the converter software. Some create Page Segments (PSEGs) with certain types of compress, others with different types. Some versions use lossy compresion, others don't. Of course there are various options to control these things but either they don't work or the customer can't get them to work. At the end of the day they suffer constantly with bad PSEG files.

The customer has this all hooked up with various other tools from us and other vendors to create a series of PSEG files with various rotations (AFP lacks a general purpose rotation operator for PSEGs). So we were able to bypass all of the spit and bailing wire and create a single application to convert PDF and PS directly to the proper set of rotated PSEG files.

The critical issues for this tool where 1) convet with LZW compress (no data loss), 2) provide alpha channel data based on color (white in this case is white), 3) emit a series of TIF files (rotated at 0, 90, 180 and 270), and 4) emit a PDF with four pages having the same rotations as in #3. After some work I was able to create a tool to handle the AFP conversions for images and combine this with some of our existing technology to create a conversion product.

We gave them this tool, set up their hot folders, etc. and now they are starting to use it. Since we understand this entire process end-to-end now we are able to give them much better support than their other vendor. For example, they called up and said "the transparency is not working for this PDF". It turned out their other AFP application was using the wrong version and failed to emit transparency (this is hard to imagine for a mature product). Now they are calling us about all sorts of AFP problems...

So it occurs to me that they can't be the only ones having these problems and I start to sketch out an AFP product to help them.