Using AFP resources

After creating the text for your document, you will probably want to format it to make it more readable and interesting. You can use images—such as charts, graphs, logos, boxes, and lines—to illustrate or to separate various sections. You can also use fonts to emphasize different areas of text. You might like to draw from a catalog of predefined graphic and text elements created for your enterprise. You might like to combine text and graphic elements into segments (such as footers, headers, or side bars) that you can position as single units on the page. To ensure consistency, you can specify common elements and layout for documents of the same type.

Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) resources provide powerful tools for controlling the appearance of your documents. InfoPrint Manager includes a number of AFP resources. The different types of AFP resources follow:

Color management resource

Color management resource (CMR) is an architected resource that is used to carry all of the color management information required to render a print file, document, group of pages or sheets, page, or data object with color fidelity.

Data object resources

Data object resources are a type of AFP resource; they can be an IOCA file or a type of file natively supported by a particular model of printer (for example, an EPS file on an InfoPrint Color 130 plus). In addition, if you use the transforms that come with InfoPrint Manager to convert objects into AFP first, these non-native types of files can be used as data object resources as well. In InfoPrint Manager, data object resources are grouped with BCOCA and GOCA objects, and they are collectively known as presentation object containers.

Fonts

A font is a single size and typeface in a particular type family, including letters, numerals, punctuation marks, special characters, and ligatures.

Form definitions

Form definitions provide instructions on how output devices position data on the page. Form definitions can specify overlays, a paper source for cut-sheet printer devices, duplexed printing, text suppression, data position, and the number and modifications of pages.

Page definitions

Page definitions contain the formatting controls for line data. Page definitions can include controls for the number of lines per logical page, font selection, print direction, and the mapping of individual fields to positions on the logical page.

Page segments

Page segments contain text and images that you can include at any addressable point on a page or an electronic overlay.

Overlays

Overlays are collections of predefined data—such as lines, shading, text boxes, or logos—that can merge with variable data on a page or a form during printing or transmission.

InfoPrint Manager provides several methods for accessing AFP resources. If the only AFP resources available are those that shipped with InfoPrint Manager, they are accessed automatically when a job needs them. If, however, you are using other AFP resources, you must specify the location of these resources. There are also ways to specify resource locations through job submission parameters and environment variables. Finally, each document in a job can specify the path to each of the AFP resource types it requires. You can elect to handle these specifications with a default document associated with a logical destination.

You can use resource-context objects to access your AFP resources. Resource-context objects identify the locations of different types of AFP resources that jobs sent to PSF actual destinations can reference. Resource-context objects let you encapsulate the directory path name in one place. You then specify the resource-context object name rather than a directory name when specifying where to find resources. Later, if the location of a resource changes, you only need to modify the path name specified in the corresponding resource-context object.

You must use the pdcreate command (at an Linux command prompt) to create a resource-context object. You then reference this object when you create or modify a PSF actual destination in the InfoPrint Manager Administration GUI or the Web Interface. Jobs can also reference resource-context objects through their contained documents. Both the actual destination and the resource-context objects that are referenced must reside in the same InfoPrint Manager server.