December 20, 2001 - Reading time: 4 minutes

Georgia State University project using txt2pdf PRO

Historically, as each new semester would approach, Georgia State University would print 40,000 copies of its "Schedule of Classes". This process included choosing a specific "cut off" date when we would run a batch job against our legacy IDMS database on an MVS system. The batch job would produce a "Schedule of Classes" report that would be printed on a Xerox 4850 channel attached printer. This resulting printed report was bundled with other material and sent to a print shop to be assembled into the actual printed document. This all had to occur two weeks prior to actual registration.

Unfortunately the printed "Schedule of Classes" was simply a snapshot of the course offerings at THAT one moment in time, two weeks PRIOR to the actual start of registration. During the actual registration process additional classes are often added and sometimes removed, locations are changed, and times can change. This updated information is NOT reflected within the printed "Schedule Of Classes".

GSU's Information System & Technology department was asked if there was anyway to produce a PDF version of the "Schedule of Classes" directly from the information maintained within the legacy IDMS system. Having proved the feasibility two years earlier, we knew exactly what tool to try, txt2pdf PRO.

Over the course of one weekend, the basic structure of the build process was fleshed out. The original batch job was modified to write its output to a temporary file on the MVS system rather than directly to the Xerox printer spool. A cronjob was setup on a Solaris system to submit the modified batch job to the MVS system once an hour. The batch job results in a new course listing report. The course listing report is transferred from the MVS system to the Solaris system for eventual processing by txt2pdf PRO.

Unfortunately, the raw IDMS generated course listing report was created for use by a channel attached Xerox printer. The raw course listing report was constructed to take advantage of certain Xerox printer features such as multiple logical pages and font indexing. The course listing report also contains ANSI style carriage control characters (i.e. "1", " ", "+", "-", "0"), that had to be translated into their ASCII text file equivalents.

Because of the Xerox and ANSI print controls, the raw course listing report is first fed into a couple of quick and dirty Perl "filters" ("cookAnsiCourseListing", "resequenceSections") to convert the raw course listing file into a more useful "cooked" text file. This resulting "cooked" text file is what is fed into txt2pdf PRO. The resulting PDF file is copied over to a web directory where it is immediately available on the Internet.

It typically takes five to six minutes from the time the cronjob initiates the MVS batch job to moment the updated courses.pdf file is available on the web.

One feature of txt2pdf PRO that proved to be most amazing is the ability to produce a compressed PDF file. Our current course listing is typically around 100 pages. Without txt2pdf PRO's compression feature the PDF file was around 1,078 KB (1,078,000 bytes). With compression enabled, the resulting PDF file has shrunk to around 207 KB (207,000 bytes)!

By using txt2pdf PRO to produce a PDF version of our "Schedule of Classes", GSU has saved a considerable amount of money by not having to generate any printed versions, and has also increased the quality and timeliness of the data available to potential students by allowing for regular automatic updates of the courses.pdf to be published to the web.

Here you can download our last "Schedule of Classes".

October 24, 2001 - Reading time: ~1 minute

The Corporate Accounting System (CAS) of the Province of British Columbia uses Oracle Financials software.
Modules implemented include General Ledger, Payables, Purchasing, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, and Project Accounting.
CAS makes use of txt2pdf PRO software to convert text reports to pdf format.
This has eliminated the need to define and maintain printers in the CAS Oracle system.
Before txt2pdf PRO was implemented, some 1500 printers had to be defined in the system, with another 1500 being planned.
After txt2pdf PRO was put into operation, only forty-three printers needed to be defined.

October 2, 2001 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Costa Crociere, a company of Carnival Corporation, is using txt2pdf PRO
"Our mainframe applications create a lot of textual reports with confidential information.
Lotus Domino agents take these reports from mainframe and import them inside the Costa Crociere intranet (CostaPlanet).
The same Lotus Domino agents, using txt2pdf PRO, can convert the textual reports to PDFs and put them online!"

September 1, 2001 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Leighton Contractors is a large infrastructure construction company, covering Australia and New Zealand.
txt2pdfPRO is being used in our Report Distribution System, to distribute our month-end project costing reports, to project managers around Australia via the corporate Intranet. The system that produces the initial report is an Oracle legacy system running under OpenVMS, whose output is a formatted plain text file. txt2pdfPRO does a superb job in converting these to PDF files which are then placed on our Intranet in a secure area for project managers to view.
Contact: Greg Newton

July 25, 2001 - Reading time: 2 minutes

What is DMS EXPO?
DMS EXPO is a info chainment aptly (at Essen, Germany) describes the entire information chain:

• Information Production (Creation and Layout)
• Information Acquisition (Search, Retrieval and Data Mining)
• Information Processing (Entry and Scanning)
• Information Management (Engineering & Product Data Management, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing)
• Information Storage (Data, Document and Information Data Warehousing)
• Information Development (Knoledge-Management and Customer Relationship Management)
• Information Logistics (Workflow, Supply Chain Management, Output Management, Messaging, Groupware, Networks and Telecomunication)
• Information Archiving (Micrography,Analogue and Digital Archiving)
• Information Security (IT Security and Digital Signatures)
• Information Output (Digital Print On Demand)

Who will be visiting DMS EXPO?
Each September around 20,000 senior business and IT professionals know that DMS EXPO is a MUST ATTEND event. Experts from both home an abroad have partecipated in numerous forums, conferences and presentations.

Visitor pre-registration project
The idea of DMS EXPO was to realize a cgi application where the visitor can per-register himself. This application has to store the data and send on the fly to the email of the visitor his PDF ticket.
This project was developed with few days of work with using the SANFACE Software knowledge and  product.