MO:DCA (Mixed Object:Document Content Architecture) is an

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

compound document format for text and graphics elements in a document. The 'Mixed Object' refers to the fact that an MO:DCA file can contain multiple types of objects, including text, images, vector graphics, and barcodes.

Overview

MO:DCA supports Revisable Documents, which are editable like

revisable-form text Document Content Architecture, or DCA for short, is a standard developed by IBM for text documents in the early 1980s. DCA was used on Mainframe computer, mainframe and IBM i systems and formed the basis of DisplayWrite's file format. DCA was late ...

, Presentation Documents, which provide specific output formatting similar to final-form text, and Resource Documents, which hold control information such as fonts. An MO:DCA file consists of a sequential, ordered hierarchy of independent objects - documents, pages, data objects, and resource objects such as fonts and ICC profiles. Each object is delimited by begin/end structures, and objects to be rendered specify presentation parameters and resource requirements in structures called "environment groups". Since the pages in MO:DCA documents appear in sequential order, presentation can start as soon as the first page is received. Formats for specific objects are specified in various OCAs (Object Content Architectures): PTOCA for presentation text that has been formatted for output, GOCA for vector graphics objects, IOCA for bitmapped Images, FOCA for fonts, and BCOCA for barcodes. MO:DCA is implemented as IBM's Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) page description language. A number of applications use MO:DCA, including eViewer, a MO:DCA viewer used by IBM solutions, IBM DisplayWrite, and printers and other devices supporting AFP.

Encoding

MO:DCA-P carries text, image, and graphics data objects, therefore the data is a mixture of binary data and character data. The recommended content-transfer-encoding is base64.

Security

MO:DCA-P is a specification of final-form presentation data of an Image. It is not a programming language, does not contain any file operators, and therefore cannot corrupt a receiver's file system or programming environment. MO:DCA and Mixed Object Document Content Architecture are trademarks of the IBM Corporation.

Interoperability

MO:DCA-P defines interchange sets to support interoperability. Currently defined sets are Interchange Set 1 (IS/1) and Interchange Set 2 (IS/2).

Notes

References

External links

AFP Resources

Registration of IBM MO:DCA-P MIME Type
{{Office document file formats Graphics file formats Printing Advanced Function Presentation IBM software