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Posted to fop-commits@xmlgraphics.apache.org by Apache Wiki <wi...@apache.org> on 2009/08/27 09:25:10 UTC

[Xmlgraphics-fop Wiki] Trivial Update of "AFPResources" by JeremiasMaerki

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The following page has been changed by JeremiasMaerki:
http://wiki.apache.org/xmlgraphics-fop/AFPResources

The comment on the change is:
Added another tool

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   * [http://www.winafp.com WinAFP] (commercial) is a great tool to inspect AFP files and to manually modify them. Content folding allows to quickly scan through large files. It runs on Microsoft Windows.
  
+  * [http://www.btbnet.de/wps/portal/AFP-Tools BTB Browser] is another AFP viewer which is probably better suited for preview than IBM's tools as it doesn't replace bitmap fonts with platform fonts. It also has a good AFP decoder useful for debugging.
+ 
  == Tips for developing with AFP ==
  
  MO``:DCA & Co. have grown over time but the specifications usually don't tell if a particular feature is an old or new feature. There are still a lot of AFP/IPDS environments around which only support a very old version and only bi-level printing. Relying on just the AFP Workbench has proven to be insufficient as this viewer supports a lot of features and is quite lenient about what you do in AFP. Furthermore, fonts are painted using operating system outline fonts even if you specify bitmap fonts in your print files. Obviously, the best way to test is having an older IPDS laser printer around but there you have the problem that you get non-helpful error messages if something's wrong. Additional, unfortunately commercial, viewer applications can help further during debugging. AFP dumpers like AFPAN (see above) are also a very important source for information. It is quite sensitive to mistakes. Rule number one: Test in as many environments as possible. No single tool will be 
 able to tell you that the file you produced is correct and works in most environments.

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