AFP fonts from OpenType

Martin Wenzel
Martin Wenzel Posts: 53
in Font Technology
Hi, we’re looking for someone to convert TrueType OpenType Fonts for the AFP environment (IBM’s Advanced Function Presentation) which is often used for high volume printing. We had asked the same question on typedrawers.com in 2022 but got no answer. 

Three years later: Has anyone worked with someone who can do this?
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Comments

  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 679
    I just asked chatGPT about it and it has a lot to say about it. But without knowing AFP it doesn’t make much sense to me. But it seems to be a good starting point.
  • Martin Wenzel
    Martin Wenzel Posts: 53
    I tried it myself now, and indeed, it does have a lot to say about it!
  • George Thomas
    George Thomas Posts: 652
    There appears to be at least one conversion program listed by Google at makeafp.com
  • John Nolan
    John Nolan Posts: 54
    Idle curiosity:
    It seems that AFP supports OpenType and TrueType. In what situation is that support deficient?
  • Martin Wenzel
    Martin Wenzel Posts: 53
    edited March 4
    Thanks for the tip, @George Thomas but we’d rather not do this ourselves but have a professional do it for us. Converting fonts can go wrong in many different ways 😬
  • Martin Wenzel
    Martin Wenzel Posts: 53
    John Nolan said:
    Idle curiosity:
    It seems that AFP supports OpenType and TrueType. In what situation is that support deficient?

    We were arguing along that line as well but the client has a working system that they rather not change.
  • Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
    Denis Moyogo Jacquerye Posts: 215
    https://www.terrapin.co.uk/AFPFonts.html comes up in searches and seems to be offering AFP fonts services. Maybe they offer format conversion services?

  • Miles Newlyn
    Miles Newlyn Posts: 262
    edited March 5
    I've used Terrapin for AFP conversion. I can recommend their service. Speak to Neil Schaffer.
  • Martin Wenzel
    Martin Wenzel Posts: 53
    edited March 5
    Thank you all for your comments, very helpful. I had found terrapin.co.uk yesterday but wasn’t sure if they do conversions. I had sent them an email and they already came back with a positive answer.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,152
    This topic piqued my curiosity. While I can't supply any helpful answers, being new to what AFP is, I found out some background information that may help some people make sense of this thread.
    AFP is a document format used with IBM mainframes. Think of it as being something like PostScript. Printers exist that work from data streams in AFP.
    AFP documents can use TrueType and OpenType fonts, but the native font format for AFP is FOCA. FOCA fonts are sometimes also referred to as AFP fonts.

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