Using fixed metadata fields and a series of control and other special characters, ANPA-1312 was designed to feed text stories to both teleprinters and computer-based news editing systems.
As such, it was a bridge between older typesetting methods, newspaper traditions and newer technology.
Perhaps the best known part of ANPA-1312 was the category code system, which allowed articles to be categorized by a single letter.
Although ANPA-1312 was superseded in the early 1990s by IPTC Information Interchange Model and later by the XML-based News Industry Text Format, its popularity in North America remained strong due, in part, to its widespread support by The Associated Press and the reluctance of newspapers to invest in new computers or software modifications.
An international standard, IPTC 7901, is widely used in Europe and is closely related to ANPA-1312.