October 25, 2000 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Stevens Graphics, Inc, a leading US Directory printer, uses a legacy UNIX based integrated Management Information system, designed for medium to large printing companies. The system is character based, and most of the reporting is plain text.
In an initiative to "E-tize" the business, we started off looking for a tool which would convert and store the text based reports, and have them be available for viewing and printing by multiple users. One software package that we started to justify, had a price tag of $15,000 including a new server to run the application.
We discovered txt2pdf from Sanface software, and from the moment that the trial version was installed, we were hooked and sold. Using this tool, we are now converting many of the text reports that are distributed to PDF, and publishing then on our Intranet where they can be accessed by users using the free Adobe Reader. The user can then reap the benefits of PDF, being able to scale the screen image on the screen, search for text, and print a scaled version to their attached PC printer.
One of the biggest uses that we have currently, is the suite of Day End reports that are generated by our Management Information system every night. These are around 6 inches thick each night, and were printed on green bar paper on a high speed line printer. The amount of storage that these reports required deemed that we could only keep a certain amount before the older ones were discarded to reclaim storage space. Now with txt2pdf, we can save electronic versions of the reports indefinitely, as they are of small size, users can view and search the reports from their desk without making a trip to the records storage room, and we have been able to retire the aging high speed line printer and cancel our maintenance contract. Not only a huge cost saving for a tiny investment, but a major change in efficient access and use of the information.

October 21, 2000 - Reading time: 2 minutes

HVAC Estimator provides online service agreement estimating services for the Heating and Air Conditioning industry. We chose data2pdf to generate the contract documents and equipment lists for the users of our service. The resulting PDF files created from data2pdf is far superior to the other methods we tried. They are small allowing them run much faster over our servers than standard PDF files. We are very pleased with the results.
We have an online estimating service for Heating and Air Conditioning service contractors. We wanted our users to be able to generate contract documents without having to do any formatting before they were ready to print. Since online coding languages are very limited in their printing abilities we looked at PDF. We spent many hours trying to get FDF to work but we were unhappy with the results achieved. The help Adobe provided was limited and unresponsive.
We developed a work around method that used PDF fields and replaced the default value in the field as if it were a string. This was dangerous because at anytime we could have ended up with a broken PDF file that would not open for the service user. Also the PDF files were very large. Some were as big as 300k much too large for an online service to deliver quickly over a 56k modem.
Now we use data2pdf to create contract documents templates for our service users placing strings within the templates then populating then with service user's data. Similar to the way FDF is supposed to work. The files are much smaller using data2pdf the largest being only 36k a substantial reduction in size from 300k.

Here you can find an example of our PDF agreement (40K)

October 11, 2000 - Reading time: ~1 minute

QDC Business Engineering is using txt2pdf in Intra- and Extranet client projects.
In particular txt2pdf provides invaluable support for formatting reports from legacy systems to the level that can be served through WWW-portal solutions.
Proper page breaks and the wide variety of formatting possibilities are key features in rejuvenating age-old reporting systems.

October 10, 2000 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Acxiom Corp. project

We were in the process of converting mainframe reports on micro-fiche to Adobe PDF files. The process was initially done manually, and took an extensive amount of hours, even for small size reports. We started to use TXT2PDF instead, and with its features and speed we were able to automate the entire process !
Combining mainframe utilities and TXT2PDF options, the process works like this:
Mainframe batch jobs execute at night, create and print reports using the FBA option for carriage control printing.
These reports are also captured to disk, and another step in the jobs converts the mainframe page eject code ('1' in column 1) to PC page eject code (hex '0C' in column 1).
The report files are then FTP'ed to a PC-server, and a process starts automatically on the server, invoking TXT2PDF that creates PDFs from the mainframe reports.
Distribution of the PDFs is done via e-mail, CDs, etc.
Another challenge was to jump quickly to sub-reports within one main report.
Adobe reader 'Find" command was too slow doing this process.
Using TXT2PDF 'LINK' feature, we were able to create one single links.cfg file that contains ALL the reports IDs. Using this feature allows us to navigate through huge reports and sub-reports in seconds !
The technical support that was provided to us by Sanface during this implementation process was phenomenal!
Any question, issue, or problem that we had was emailed to Sanface, and the next morning an email with the solution was there.

October 10, 2000 - Reading time: 3 minutes

The Department of Planning, Design & Construction (PDC) at Cornell University project

We were looking for a way to avoid having to handle and store the "Office Copy" of invoices produced by our cost accounting system. We generate about 2,600 invoices per month, each one has anywhere from 2 - 30 pages. We needed a quasi unalterable copy for record retention and audit purposes.
We were also looking for away to leverage technology to make the office copy available on line to avoid having to walk down the hall to get a copy when trying to resolve a customer inquiry. We wanted the account representatives to have an exact copy of what the customer was looking at when they called.
txt2pdf PRO filled the bill. Each month, we generate two text files for each invoice. One is a config file used by txt2PDF Pro, the other the text file with the invoice data. We also create a bat file used to do a batch create of the PDF documents and to create entries in an Oracle database allowing us to search and retrieve the PDF documents.
The whole thing runs start to finish each month in about 20 minutes in the middle of the night and is available to our account reps via a web interface by the time they get into work the next morning and days before our customers get the hard copy. It is a hit.
Why txt2pdf PRO?
We were headed down a path of creating program code that would create individual postscript files that would have to be run through Acrobat Distiller. It is difficult code to write and maintain. This equals expensive. Also, it is a process that does not lend itself well to automation and would not allow us to fill in the document info such as keywords, title, etc.
We found out about txt2pdf PRO midway through the process. We had three programmer weeks into the program that was to create the postscript files and it still was not working properly. We had a real deadline to get it done. We were able to reuse some of that code to create a program that makes the config and text files for txt2pdf PRO. The project was complete that week and went onto production with a few days to spare.
Here you can find an example of our invoices, now in PDF!