Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

There is an updated version of the IBM AFP Driver available that fixes most of the color conversion issues. It may be included in recent versions of System i Access, but it might also help to try this direct download link here.

My suggestion would be to no longer use the method below.

IBM provides it’s own printer driver for creating AFP overlays. However, this printer driver is broken for quite some time, and doesn’t handle the colors used in color overlays correctly. If you want to create black and white overlays on your System i, use the original IBM AFP print driver.

If you want to create color overlays, things become a tad more difficult. First, you’ll need a device that supports IPDS FS45 for color printing. There are several IPDS ROMs sold for Lexmark Color Lasers which do not support FS45.

ExcelliPrint however does support FS45 (and works flawlessly with color overlays) – and no, i’m still not getting paid for writing about ExcelliPrint.

But back to our overlays. Creating a working, fully fledged color overlay is not difficult, but it’s an unintegrated process with lots of manual steps.

First, you need two pieces of Software: the InfoPrint converter software, for which you’ll need to install 5722-IP1 on your System i and a way to create TIFF images (if you’re using e.G. Adobe Illustrator for creating your overlays, you can skip this) – i’ve found ZAN Image Printer to suit my needs perfectly.

After Installing 5722-IP1, you can find the InfoPrint converter software in the following IFS directory:

/QIBM/ProdData/InfoprintServer/Transforms/Install/Image/setup.exe

ust install the application, and you’re already done.

Next step would be to install the ZAN Image Printer.

Now you can print your Microsoft Word overlay using the ZAN Image Printer – make sure to choose the following settings: TIFF, 24bit, LZW compression.

Save this file wherever you’ll find it again. After that, use the tiff2afp tool to create the AFP overlay itself:

tiff2afp -a ioca45 -pagetype overlay -cmp jpeg foo.tiff

This will create foo.afp. Note that it will probably look broken in the AFP viewer – this is normal (and a bug of the AFP viewer).

All you need to do now is to upload this overlay file into your System i – i’m not completely sure how that works (our dev guys handle that nicely), but i’ve found some information about it here.