November 25, 2004 - Reading time: 3 minutes

Independent Liquor Group PDF Invoice Project

Independent Liquor Group (ILG) is a major liquor wholesaler in Sydney. We sell about 2.5m cases of wine and spirits each year to pubs and restaurants. We have sophisticated electronic commerce interfaces and about 80% of our business comes to us on-line. We use OVMS internally and Win2000S systems for the Internet.

Although we provide paper invoices with deliveries, and also provide electronic invoices to our customers, we are still plagued by requests for copies of back invoices and credit notes from both customers and suppliers, sometimes going back six months. We used to provide these by fax or e-mail.

With the aid of TXT2PDF, we now provide up to six months back invoices in PDF format on our Web sites. Customers can search for and download the PDF version themselves on a 24x7 basis. This is better for both of our customers and us, especially since our customers do business at all hours of the day and night.

We already had the Web facilities and the text versions of the invoices. To automate the production of the PDF invoices on OVMS and integrate them with our Win2000S Web sites took only two man days... the hardest part was the company logo! This project was probably easier for us since the same people have developed both systems. We were able to make our PDF invoices look exactly the same as our paper invoices. See example below.

We generate our invoices with software we have developed ourselves in house as part of a much larger system. We use a multi-platform development environment call "Synergy". Synergy evolved from an old Digital (DEC) language called Dibol that was originally on DEC PDP computers, but the same code will run unmodified on a host of systems, including OVMS, Windows, Unix and Linux. In fact, the invoicing software we use is 25 years old but it still does what we want.

I suppose this simple project illustrates how smart, modern tools like TXT2PDF can be used to extend the useful life of the legacy systems that are used by many companies in all parts of the world! We now hope to eventually phase out of printed invoices completely.

Here 2 nice examples of invoices:
invoice 1
invoice 2

November 16, 2004 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Athlon Car Lease Germany project

Athlon Car Lease Germany is an independant supplier for car leasing and fleetmanagement in Germany. Athlon developed an unique web portal for online full service lease, the portal is called Autopnet. This portal is the reference for local benchmarks for online leasing and fleetmanagement.
As developerplatform we are using the oracle development-tools combined with the oracle database and oracle applicationserver. For the backoffice we are converting from Oracle Forms 6i to Oracle WebForms.

The problem.
All our external correspondence we are producing within our backoffice, has to be in pdf-format. With our standard reportingtool it is possible to create a pdf-file but it was not that flexible. We allso had some problems with specific fonts and had little problems to get a suitable layout.
So we searched for an easy-to-use tool to solve our problems.

txt2pdf PRO.
We did some testing and choose txt2pdf PRO because this is an easy-to-use tool. There are lots of possibilities for configure the pdf-file, we could easily adjust the layout, we can use our company-logo, etc. For the moment we are using a small part off the possibilities, but lateron we will have a look at the other possibilities to create professional documents. We will allso have a look to offer pdf-functionality within our webportal, I guess txt2pdf PRO will be used within that project allso.

October 24, 2004 - Reading time: 3 minutes

PCCC eBook Fullfillment System

Technical White Paper describing PCCC eBook Fulfillment System
Wed Sep 1, 2004 2:14 PM ET

FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA - In summer 2004, the author of "Quote Without Comment" approached our firm, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, to assist with the publication of an eBook version of his book. After pursuing many avenues, including Adobe's Content servers and ContentReserve, we determined that the existing solutions in the status quo simply would not work for us. In particular, we began to focus on removing the barrier to entry that the current Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems cause for an average end-user.

In short, we felt that existing eBook solutions were:

• poorly understood by the general public.
• too cumbersome and required too much computer knowledge just to read the book let alone ensure that it would be available to them for a lifetime.
• too costly for authors to deploy as the software and programming requirements can be fairly high.
• a serious barrier to the sale because of the rights management with no balance towards the eBook owner's rights.

That's when we decided to develop a new, simpler eBook fulfillment system using PDFCrypt. This system would produce standard PDF files with password-protected 128-bit encryption without the extra layer of rights management, thereby giving the author moderate protection of the eBook content and significant ease of use for the end-user.

Specifically, the system starts on a standard website (e.g. www.QuoteWithoutComment.com) where we list the books available and use PayPal's Merchant tools to create buy now buttons.

Once the user completes a PayPal purchase, we use Auto-Return w/ Payment Data Transfer (PDT) to return them to a fulfillment page. The fulfillment system then retrieves the transaction information from PayPal and performs various checks for potential fraud. In addition, depending on our long-term success with PDT, we may change the system to use PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN) instead.

After the order has passed all of the checks, the system takes a type-set ready eBook in Acrobat v1.4 PDF format with no security settings and uses PDF::Reuse to add the eBook owner's email address to the bottom of each page (i.e. Ex Libris: kmcgrail@pccc.com).

Finally, the customized eBook is encrypted with PDFCrypt using Adobe's 128-bit encryption method with the "No Print, No Edit and No Copy" security enabled and emailed out automatically. For simplicity to the end-user, the email address for fulfillment of the order is also the password for the eBook.

In the end, the user receives a personalized eBook, compatible with any Adobe Acrobat Reader v5.0 or higher, which generates and encrypts a 270 page eBook in just a few seconds thanks to great tools like PDFCrypt.

September 27, 2004 - Reading time: 3 minutes

METRO Group project

Trade – that is the world of METRO Group, one of the worldwide largest trading groups. It was created in 1996 in a merger of several important retail companies. Based on its successful performance in the domestic market the group soon expanded into foreign markets as well. Today, METRO AG is at the head of a capital marketorientated, highly-competitive retail group with an international profile. At more than 2,300 locations in 28 countries the Metro company proves this competence – with concepts that meet the highest quality demands.

Business Units and Sales Divisions of the Group
METRO Group has a definite structured portfolio of group companies that operate in the market place according to distinct and specific distribution concepts. These so-called sales divisions operate in the four business units Cash & Carry, Food Retailing, Nonfood Specialty Stores and Department Stores. Their customers are both businesses and consumers. The six sales divisions of the METRO Group stand for names that have become for many people a part of everyday life:

• Metro Cash & Carry International GmbH
• Real SB-Warenhaus GmbH
• Extra Verbrauchermärkte GmbH
• Media-Saturn-Holding GmbH
• Praktiker-Bau- und Heimwerkermärkte AG
• Kaufhof Warenhaus AG

MIAG C.V. , Diemen NL, Branch Baar
Our Company belongs to the METRO AG and assume the centralized payment and its guarantee, as well as some international co-ordination for our European affiliated companies and their suppliers. In this connection we develope solutions for our customers, the suppliers of the Metro Group, to deliver the payment advice as a PDF. Also we provide the PDF on our Internet Portal www.miag.com for download. The monthly output is about 150'000 pages. A part of these we produce with txt2pdf.

Application
We receive the data from our Japanese business partner in a different codepage “shif-jis”, and we will import these in our database. Within the payment process we export the data from our Oracle 9i database, with an SQL procedure. A Cobol program provides a Ascii-file in the correct format. This Ascii-File will be converted with txt2pdf from Sanface. Normally, in use with western codepages, there are no problems. We use the utilities from txt2pdf (configured) for other projects, also with Czech and Slovakian characters. At the conversation from data with japanese and western characters, it was not possible to get a correct result with txt2pdf version 7.3. The problem was, to use „fixed width“ fonts. Since the characters are deposited still with a layout, the individual indications must always be positioned exactly. Unfortunately at the start of the project we can’t use txt2pdf within this project. With the assistance and support from Sanface, we fount a work around to create an account form, with “shift-jis” data from the data base, as well with both, japanese and western indications in the same print file.

Here you can find the original PDF file description of this project.

August 9, 2004 - Reading time: 2 minutes

The Columbia Forest Products project

Columbia Forest Products (CFP) is North America's finest manufacturer of hardwood veneer, hardwood plywood, flooring and laminated products. Sold through a network of wholesale distributors, mass merchandisers and major OEMs, Columbia Forest Products' decorative interior veneers and panels are used in high-end cabinetry, fine furniture, architectural millwork and commercial fixtures.

CFP has embarked on an extensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system implementation for its Plywood Division that will tie together the manufacturing, distribution, sales, and accounting functions and provide greater control and accuracy of the business processes throughout the division. The focus of the project is to provide Perfect service, every time to CFP customers, ensuring that the customer receives their product of choice, made with highest quality and delivered at the right time. The system is being installed in CFP locations across North America, linking together CFP sites and CFP customers via a common database and common processes.

The reports generated daily by this new system can be very detailed and can be several hundred pages long. The SANFACE Software txt2pdf PRO utility allows CFP to take text output and create a document that is easily sent via email to be viewed uniformly on each end user's PC. With txt2pdf, CFP can greatly reduce the size of a report through compression, which reduces network load significantly. The txt2pdf software is particularly useful given the heavy load that transferring and printing massive reports would create on CFP’s intranet. Because CFP’s manufacturing facilities are located in rural areas where bandwidth can be expensive, the utility has significantly reduced potential transmission costs as well.