Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) Resources

Audience

This course is intended for all users who need to design, create and/or implement AFP Resources. This may include operations support personnel, programmers, analysts and systems programmers.

Prerequisites

Delegates should be familiar with the basic concepts of printing and spooling in an operating system.

Duration

4 days.

Course Objectives

This course teaches the delegate how to create and/or use Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) resources. After relevant lectures, delegates will create page definitions, form definitions and electronic overlays, and will select fonts and page segments as required to meet application requirements. They will use the Page Printer Formatting Aid (PPFA) and Overlay Generation Language (OGL) utility programs.

Course Content

An Overview of AFP
- Concepts and terminology
- AFP resources
- Using fonts and code pages
- Categories of AFP application
- More about Presentation

Electronic Overlays
- Overlay concepts
- OGL syntax and coding example
- Creating overlays using OGL

Page Definitions
- Processing line data print files
- Using channel codes
- PPFA syntax and worked examples
- Creating page definitions using PPFA

Fields in Page Definitions
- Field positioning using PPFA
- Creating a bar code using a field
- Creating a page definition with fields

Form Definitions
- Printing composed pages
- Using field suppression and overlays
- PPFA syntax and worked examples
- Creating form definitions using PPFA

Graphics and Image with AFP
- Concepts and terminology
- Creating AFP image objects
- Using page segments

Bringing it all together
- Placing data on the overlays built earlier

Multiple-Up and Power Positioning
- Basic power positioning
- Enhanced power positioning
- Overlays and power positioning

More Advanced Techniques
- Multiple page formats in page definitions
and copy groups in form definitions
- Relative PRINTLINE in page definitions
- Record formatting data options
- Duplexing options
- Using table reference characters
- Conditional processing in page definitions
- More on bar codes
- Practicals exploiting several of these

Please Note:
This course needs to be run on customer premises, using customer facilities for the labs. It is therefore necessary that the programs required for the labs are installed on the customer’s machines (Page Printer Formatting Aid (PPFA) and Overlay Generation Language (OGL) utility programs).