October 11, 2002 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Hurley Medical Center project

"I am the Senior Programmer Analyst responsible for the Human Resources/Payroll System (GEAC) at Hurley Medical Center an hospital in Flint, Michigan
I was requested to look for alternatives to using our mainframe printers. The cost for maintaining the printers was getting rather expensive and they are investing in software to redirect printing to our print shop here. My departments didn't really want the reports to print there.
We generate around 90,000 pages of paper during our pay run. Most of this is copied to fiche. But we still print between 10,000 and 12,000 pages during a pay. We had tried using Word to capture the reports because of page breaks but it significantly increased the file sizes and it takes a considerable amount of time to do it. I turned to the Web to look for alternatives.
With txt2pdf PRO we were able to capture and create PDF files. It uses less disk space and I can put a years worth of data on one CD. It cut the time to convert down by 3/4th. My next task will be to right policies and procedures so the Operations Department can assume the processing of the data for my users. Your help as we tested the product was thorough and produced exactly what I needed."

Keith T Hearsch

June 4, 2002 - Reading time: ~1 minute

The German main office of SAR GmbH has about 250 employees.
They get their payrolls via mail each month. That means each document has to be printed, put in an envelope and brought to the post office with a EUR 0,56 stamp on it.
What we do now is to encrypt these payrolls with txt2pdf PRO + crypt and send them via email to the employees' mail addresses. It cost us some programming, a little administration tool for the intranet and the $ 1.200 for the txt2pdf PRO + crypt.
In less than one year (only calculate the stamp amount and the amount to buy and print the letters and the envelopes) we'll save costs.

May 25, 2002 - Reading time: 2 minutes

About The Electronic Insurance Service
Since 1989, The Electronic Insurance Service has been providing EDI services for dental offices and insurance companies nation wide.

The problem
As we moved more and more of our business to an Internet environment, we found many of our clients had difficulty printing our standard text reports. We investigated many options, but found txt2pdf PRO did everything we needed to drastically improve the look of our reports and increase customer satisfaction.

Why txt2pdf PRO?
Here's what we found to be advantages of txt2pdf PRO

• We didn't have to Re-write our reports in-order to fit on a PDF Form
• We didn't have to create the PDF Form that our report data would fit into.
• We were able to run conversions in Batch mode instead of writing code that would take all our text files and turn them into PDFs. This lets us have more control over when the PDFs are created and can be run as a stand alone process in case we need to have the PDFs created again.
• Saved us in Processing Time for our Report Process. Writing code could have slowed down our Report Process.
• Txt2pdf PRO was able to read our Form Feeds and break all of our reports into separate pages. That was a huge advantage of txt2pdf PRO vs. other products we looked at.

Probably the biggest reason for using txt2pdf PRO is its ease of use and implementation. We were able to implement the solution in one day. Txt2pdf PRO converts thousands of text reports to PDF format each morning in a matter of minutes.

Author
This synopsis was compiled by:

Scott Wellwood
President
The Electronic Insurance Service

April 25, 2002 - Reading time: 4 minutes

The Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. (HFM U.S.) project

As an I.S. director it's not often that I can find a utility that fits a specific need completely. More often than not, the utility hasn't even been written, or if it has, it's just not exactly what I need. So it was pretty cool when I stumbled upon something that really fit the bill-txt2pdf.

Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. (HFM U.S.) is the New York-headquartered subsidiary of Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the world's largest magazine publisher. HFM U.S. reaches nearly 50 million readers in the U.S. through its 18 titles including American Photo, Boating, Car and Driver, Car Stereo Review's Mobile Entertainment, Cycle World, ELLE, ELLE Decor, ELLEgirl, Flying, Home, Metropolitan Home, Popular Photography, Premiere, Road & Track, Sound & Vision, Travel Holiday, Woman's Day and Woman's Day Special Interest Publications.

We began a project in 2001 to decommission our last remaining mainframe system. The single application running on it was almost 100% COBOL and responsible for acknowledging and invoicing orders places for advertising in our magazines. The project was to move it to Windows NT without rewriting it all.

A main obstacle was output. The COBOL was spitting out thousands of acknowledgements and invoices monthly on preprinted multipart forms, not to mention reams of paper reports, all using line printers and 1st-column carriage control. I sure didn't want to try to configure NT to output to a line printer! As a matter of fact, I wanted to get out of the report printing business entirely and use our intranet to deliver PDFs. At first I thought Acrobat could do it all, but those pesky carriage control characters kept getting in the way and batch processing seemed difficult.

Further, I still didn't know how I was going to convert the forms to laser. For that I was going to use Crystal, but I hoped I'd be able to find an easier way; Thank goodness for the Internet. I started my research and almost immediately found txt2pdf. How many times has a software company told you, "The software doesn't exactly do that, but we've built it to be flexible so we can easily add that functionality?" Well... Yeah... OK. I'll get back to you if I don't find anything. You can imagine what it felt like to hear, "Yes. It'll do that." to every question I asked about txt2pdf. Here's what I've got it doing for me:

1. It converts all of the carriage control characters correctly-a form feed gets a new page.
2. If a report starts with a form feed, it eats it so you won't get the blank page.
3. It can run from the command line, so batch processing isn't a problem. (It's also got a GUI interface.)
4. Our reports are not always 132 characters by 60 lines, but I can custom configure a report so that it will center and look perfect coming off a laser printer. When a custom config hasn't been built, the standard config (which also can be tweaked) is used.
5. The configuration file also supports line drawing, so as txt2pdf converts each acknowledgement or invoice file, an appropriate form is created and laid on top of the now-converted line printer output. I'm importing the company logo into the form, too.

In short, the product works and Sanface supports it well. Thanks a lot, guys!

This is a sample Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. bill

Author
This synopsis was compiled by:

Peter Manse
Director of Application
Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.

February 24, 2002 - Reading time: 4 minutes

About The Halifax Herald Limited
The Halifax Herald Limited is one of Canada's oldest and largest independent newspapers. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and dating from 1875, the Herald publishes The Chronicle-Herald, The Mail-Star and The Sunday Herald.

The problem
Like all metro daily newspapers, the Herald publishes hundreds of display ads and thousands of classified ads every day, resulting in thousands of daily invoices and monthly statements. For years we printed duplicate bills so the Accounting Department would have file copies in the event an advertiser had questions or required a reprint.
Obviously, a significant amount of time and space was occupied handling these bills -- separating, filing, finding, re-filing -- all very manual processes. The bills themselves begin as huge ascii files that are printed on continuous pre-printed forms using IBM 6400 line printers.
In 2000, we developed a PERL-based document management system that indexed the ascii files by invoice number. This allowed the Accounting Department to search for a particular invoice or statement and display it on their screen. The system was quite convenient for them but not robust enough to allow us to stop printing and filing duplicates.
It proved that a document management system would save time, money and storage space, and allow us to better serve our customers. Managing, protecting, indexing and cross-referencing all these ascii files was a primary challenge. An Oracle database, fronted by a cgi interface using DBI/DBD and PERL was the answer.

Why txt2pdf PRO?
The other major concern was the integrity of ascii files -- they're easy to alter. This made PDF desirable. Customers, auditors and taxmen could agree that PDFs were exact replicas of original bills.
How to convert our ascii files to PDF? A quick search of the web turned up txt2pdfPRO. Right out of the box it produced perfect PDF versions of our bills. Of course they were still plain text, hard to read on the screen and painful to print on line printers.
txt2pdfPRO's overlay/underlay capabilities provided a perfect solution -- underlays exactly replicating our pre-printed forms, color-matched and complete with the Herald logo. Now the PDFs look just like the bills we print, making them easy to read on the screen and suitable for reprinting on laser printers.
While evaluating txt2pdfPRO we discovered it also converted all our large reports accurately to PDF. These reports are hundreds of pages thick and many are just for historical record.

Summary
Benefits derived from this project:

• No longer printing duplicate bills.
• No more manual filing of hard copy bills and reports.
• Invoices & statements available online for review and reprinting. Document database can be searched by invoice number, account number and/or date.
• Significant paper and ribbon savings.
• Large reports are now cataloged and full-text searchable.

This is a sample Herald bill

Author
This synopsis was compiled by:

Paul Williams
Director of Information Technology
The Halifax Herald Limited
Email: paul@halifaxherald.com