NAPLPS (North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax) was a standard developed to allow the easy transmission of graphics and text information over modems. Similar in the ideas of what were called ANSI and RIP, this standard was designed to be accepted across many platforms and programs, but didn't seem to ultimately catch on outside of a few notable exceptions (the users of which might not have known they were using NAPLPS to communicate).

Michael Dillon's NAPLPS document describes this standard this way:

"NAPLPS (North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax) is a communications protocol that extends ASCII to allow for the EFFICIENT transmission of picture and text information over telecommunications channels such as modems. It does not contain the commonly used ANSI protocol but it does include similar capabilities and it could be used simultaneously with ANSI although most NAPLPS terminal programs do not currently support ANSI.

"A NAPLPS image is transmitted in a manner that is independent of the resolution and color capabilities of the receiving display. There are NAPLPS terminal programs available for Amiga, Macintosh and PC's with CGA, Herc monochrome, EGA, VGA and other display resolutions.

"This is accomplished by sending instructions to the terminal program that tell it how to draw the required pictures and text. Even bitmap pictures are transmitted in a scalable fashion."