Why Use APU?APU assists you in building AFP-compatible electronic output. Effective electronic
output can provide significant benefits to an organization, particularly in the areas
of information systems costs, process reengineering, and better communications,
for example:
vReplacing preprinted multipart forms with electronic forms supplies significant
cost savings.
– Youcan print a variety of different forms one after the other without
switching forms at the printer.
– Youcan eliminate carbon forms by printing multiple copies of the same page,
that includes the capability of varying the output on each copy.
– Youcan eliminate storage space for preprinted forms because the forms are
stored electronically rather than physically occupying office space.
– Youcan change the form outside of the application program, and you do not
need to scrap or reorder preprinted forms.
vDocuments, whether printed, stored, or viewed, are critical to the workflow in
any organization. The capabilities of electronic documents provide a wealth of
opportunities to reengineer organizational processes. In fact, in many industries,
document reengineering such as bar coding is a “must.” Coding an electronic
document with bar code, optical character recognition (OCR), magnetic ink
character recognition (MICR), and images enables you to easily integrate the
document into the workflow.
vElectronic documents are more effective documents. Document elements, such as
images, text, and overlays, allow you to compose a document that does a better
job of communicating or marketing. Electronic flexibility,the ability to change a
document dynamically down to the individual transaction level, provides a wide
variety of application possibilities. Electronic documents project the image of a
strong, professional organization.
For more information about the benefits of AFP,refer to iSeries Guide to AFP and
PSF.
Printing with and without APUThis section describes the situation in environments that do and do not use APU.
Printing without APUAPU provides an application-independent, end-user approach to page and
document formatting. WithoutAPU, the application programmer can format pages
using either specifications within the application program or DDS (Data
Description Specifications), which is external to the application program.
Formatting within the program (also called internally or program-described) only
provides for line-oriented pages of output. Formatting with DDS (actually a part of
the printer file) actually provides for comprehensive AFPpages and documents.
There are DDS keywords not only for field positioning but also for every
document element (overlay,image, font, bar code, and so on) found in complex
application output.
Both these methods of formatting pages, however, areintegrated with the
application program. This is an advantage when you want to precisely customize
each page based on logic or data within the program. This is a disadvantage when
you would like to separate the processing of the application program from the
complex formatting of each page. This is even a bigger disadvantage if there is no
4APU User’s Guide