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afp introduction

The following is a quick introduction to the AFP format defined by IBM.

What does AFP stand for?

AFP stands for Advanced Function Printing or Advanced Function Presentation.

What is AFP?

AFP is a dataformat comparable to PDF or Winword. The difference however is that the internal structures of AFP are completely documented.

How is AFP structured?

AFP is a binary format that stems still from the high times of mainframe. It is a very compact format and is to this date the smallest format for defining documents.
The format is defined and maintained by IBM where you can also obtain the documentation for it.
Links to the documentation can be found at the Links page.

What is in AFP?

The structure of AFP is organized into records that are introduced with a hex character 5A (thats why people also speak about 5A-records) followed by two bytes of record length and then a unique identifying triplet.

Overview AFP Triplets
Overview FOCA Triplets