This resulted in the creation of the new AFP CMOCA (Color Management Object Content Architecture) specification, which was first published in 2006.
In May 2006 IBM announced plans to open up the complete scope of the AFP architecture to the consortium.
In February 2009 the AFPC was incorporated under a new set of bylaws with tiered membership and shared governance resulting in the creation of a formal open standards body called AFP Consortium Inc. Total membership has grown to over 35 companies and includes members from all parts of the document-processing industry.
Included with the PSF tools is the ACIF (AFP Conversion and Indexing Facility) that allows one to produce the AFP documents as a file in order to keep them and print them later, as well as adding an index to the document, very similar to Bookmarks in PDF, used for archiving purposes.
AFP was designed to make efficient use of storage, which is why it is still a popular format to manage high volumes of documents, such as in banking, telecommunication and insurance companies.
One of the more notable features of AFP printers is that output data can be placed at any addressable point on a page.
APA gives AFP applications the freedom to create output anywhere on a page, as opposed to being limited to just line and character positions.