May 15, 2011 - Reading time: ~1 minute

The SZEGED Software Inc. was founded in 1989, and our subsidiary in Romania – Pharmalog S.R.L. – was founded in 2006. Our profile is the software developing from the beginning. Since the foundation we have been developing applications, which satisfies special information claims of pharmaceutical wholesalers. The initial local used stock recording system has been developed into a robust, multi-user, complex, logistic information system with rich functionality: PharmaLog system.

Our application has made in Magic 5.62. It's running on Unix. Our system is generating reports day by day and we are using txt2pdf to convert text reports to pdf format.

November 5, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

gomembers and SANFACE Software made a partnership.
gomembers will use txt2pdf to convert plain text reports from their applications to PDF format, enabling their customers to print, transmit, or store those industry-compatible PDF files.
gomembers is the leading provider of comprehensive software and technology solutions designed to meet the needs of member-based organizations and the needs of the meetings and convention industries. gomembers' software and technology solutions enable its customers to automate a number of enterprise resource planning, member relationship management, transaction processing and member-to-member communications functions in a single software platform with seamless inter-processing of data across all applications.

June 21, 2006 - Reading time: 4 minutes

i-Modulas Software BV is a young Dutch software developer that brings an established and respected solution for the rental business of construction machines and materials to the internet. The users of i-Modulas rent the usage of the i-Modulas solution per user by the month. To start i-Modulas, they have to go to www.i-modulas.nl from where they can start the application.
Most i-Modulas reports are stored in text format in personal user directories from which they can be viewed or printed. With txt2pdf we have added a third option “make a pdf” to this. By pressing a function key the text report is converted to a pdf file and shown in the default pdf-viewer. From there it can be printed, but also e.g. mailed to a colleague.

Details:
History
i-Modulas Software BV is a young Dutch software developer that brings an established and respected solution for the rental business of construction machines and materials to the internet. The application was originally developed for Unix in the 80-ies under the name “Modulas”. Later, when Windows came up in the business environments, also Windows was supported. When at the beginning of the new century the clash came in the ict industry, the original developer of the application got into problems. An investor bought the application and decided to modernize it and to bring it to the platform of today; the internet!

Concept
In the old days, users bought a license, got a CD and installed the application on their computer. Today the users of i-Modulas rent the usage of the i-Modulas solution per user by the month (the so called ASP concept!). To start i-Modulas, they have to go to www.i-modulas.nl from where they can start the application. They can access i-Modulas from every pc with an internet connection. There are also several pda’s that can be used with i-Modulas, so the information is always at hand, wherever you may be.

Usage of txt2pdf
Most i-Modulas reports are stored in text format in personal user directories from which they can be viewed or printed. With txt2pdf we have added a third option “make a pdf” to this. By pressing a function key the text report is converted to a pdf file and shown in the default pdf-viewer. From there it can be printed, but also e.g. mailed to a colleague.
With the support of pdf i-Modulas could modernize the report interface without too large technical efforts. An example, this is how a certain report looks in the old-fashioned way:

Exactly the same report looks as pdf in the Adobe viewer looks like:

And under Linux,  is shows more or less the same as under Windows:

Experiences with txt2pdf
We were amazed how simple we could integrate txt2pdf with our i-Modulas application. The initial coding took about two days. During a long test period we experienced some problems which mainly had to do with the fact that during all the years we had included some tricks in our text reports to solve all kinds of printer problems. Some of these had to do with page handling and they conflicted with txt2pdf. We found Sanface prepared to help us with this, but in the end decided to solve this issue ourselves. We now use a kind of filter technique to filter the data before we pass it to txt2pdf. This has proved to be very effective and very reliable. Since then txt2pdf creates every day many pdf reports for all our users without any problems.

March 31, 2005 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Camgar Consultants has signed an agreement with SANFACE Software.
Camgar Consultants, located in Toronto Canada and specializing in WDS-II and other Progress based software applications, was founded in 1996 by Gary Mittleman. In addition to providing software maintenance and customization services to its clients, Camgar also provides one-stop out sourced IT management services for organizations without in-house IT departments, assuming responsibility for all aspects of clients' data requirements.
The company has made modifications to various Progress based packages to allow emailing reports using txt2pdf. Blank paper reports, invoices, purchase orders, etc. have been modified such that the user can email the document as a PDF attachment using standard Unix mail. Actual forms, like invoices, use the user's logo and form image.
The company has been working with Sanface for several years and finds the package easy to use and the technical support the best.

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