AFP Viewers...

Now that I am creating full AFP files I have started experimenting with various "free" or "demo" AFP viewers. Some simple googling will turn up a number of them:

IBM

ISIS

Compulsive Coder

CreDo

More here... 

Of course, there are many AFP commercial products available from some of these same companies as well as from companies like GMC, Elixir, Barr, and many, many more.

My experience so far playing around with some of these tools has been, to say the least, mixed.

For me there are two perspectives: a novice AFP user and an experienced software developer.

As a novice AFP user I can only equate my experience to my novice PDF user experiences from around 1998 and 1999.  At that time Adobe had just released Acrobat 3.0 and most of what I did with Acrobat started with that version.

As a software developer I am familiar with studying manuals and documents to determine how to create software and output, in this case AFP, that conforms.  I am familiar with building tools to check my own work and to validate it.  I am also familiar with discovering what is "missing" from the manuals and standards by experimentation.

So what's important as a novice?  Well, for me I'd like a tool that was simple and reliable and did what it was documented to do.  For the most part all the tools I have been looking at, at least on the surface, do this.  I like a tool that fits naturally with the AFP environment, i.e., something that's not a chore to deal with.

So, from this perspective, the first area of excitement I found was the notion of external AFP resources.  The idea, at least from what I can see, in AFP is that AFP print jobs can be split into two components: a set of resources and a job that uses them.  The resources (things like Page Segments, Images, and so forth) all have names that can be referenced in the job.   The idea is that you can separately transmit resources to a printer and then multiple jobs that reference them in order to save rasterizing and RIP time.

The resources can also be prepended to the job file so that they are "part of the job" in that a single transmission of resources and job together provide a complete definition.

The AFP manuals provide a complete and detailed description of what is supposed to work and how in this regard.  Each of the tools I have played with has a mechanism to support this.  Basically they all allow you to specify a directory where "external resources" can reside.  Jobs you present to the software do not need to have all the assets embedded and, when a reference to an asset is found that's not directly in the job stream, the directory is searched for the missing asset.

(Note to anyone following this blog - if your software is mentioned directly here - or you would be interested in me using your software and writing about it - please let me know.  I will promise that if I write about it here I will always give you a chance to respond to my findings before I write about them here - considering I may be doing something "wrong" as a novice.)

So far I have had a variety of different experiences with the external resource function.  Something software works as advertised and others display a variety of interesting issues - most notably either crashing or displaying nothing.

For example, one would imagine that attaching the resources to the job versus referencing the resources from a directory wouldn't make a difference.