January 15, 2003 - Reading time: 3 minutes

Banco Central del Uruguay project

El Banco Central del Uruguay is engaged in various efforts to discontinue the generation and conveyance of physical documents replacing them, as far as practicable, with digital documents being sent by e-mail. For that purpose, and to avoid disturbing changes or possible rejections by the individuals involved, we have sought to substitute the physical documents and related procedures by digital versions designed after their own "image and likeness" (realistic pictures of documents and procedures formerly used.)

In order to automate the delivery of personnel salary receipts previously issued on pre-printed sheets showing a photograph of the bank´s building site, it was conceived the generation of graphic format documents easily readable via an Internet navigator or by an e-mail customer. The automatic generation of these documents implies the superposition of two layers, the one with the building´s photograph and the other with variable data corresponding to each officer´s earnings and discounts per month.

Upon checking out with local companies and exploring the industry via Internet, the product txt2pdf PRO was reached solving the problem in a prompt and effective manner.

An example of a personal salary recipt.

El Banco Central del Uruguay está realizando diversos esfuerzos a fin de suprimir la generación y el traslado de documentos físicos, sustituyéndolos en lo posible por documentos digitales que se distribuyen mediante correo electrónico (e-mail). A los efectos, y a fin de evitar cambios traumáticos o eventuales rechazos por parte de las personas involucradas, se ha buscado sustituir los documentos físicos y los procedimientos asociados a ellos por versiones digitales diseñadas a "imagen y semejanza" de los documentos y procedimientos que los antecedieron.

A efectos de automatizar el envío de las liquidaciones de sueldos de los funcionarios que se distribuían en hojas preimpresas con la fotografía del edificio sede del Instituto, se ideó la generación de documentos en formato gráfico de fácil lectura mediante un navegador de internet o un cliente de correo electrónico. La generación automática de estos documentos supone la superposición de dos capas, una con la fotografía del edificio sede y otra con los datos variables que corresponden a haberes y descuentos de cada mes y cada funcionario.

Una búsqueda que abarcó consultas a empresas de nuestro medio y exploración de la industria a través de internet, condujo al producto txt2pdf PRO que permitió solucionar el problema en una forma rápida y eficaz.

Ejemplo de recibo de sueldo

November 15, 2002 - Reading time: 3 minutes

Cuando vimos la posibilidad de poder mezclar la información tomada de las Bases de Datos en Pick con gráficos y semigráficos para poder generar un documento en PDF, empezamos una nueva etapa en la generación de informes. Estos son los procesos que hemos modificado utilizando el programa txt2pdf PRO de Sanface Software:

• Generar facturas, albaranes y pedidos de clientes en formato PDF.
  Siempre hemos tenido problemas con los pre-impresos de facturas y albaranes. Para que tengan un coste más economico habia que imprimir miles de copias, con la consiguiente dependencia de no poder añadir o quitar determinados campos que pasan a ser necesarios o dejan de serlo. En estos momentos, el programador, es capaz de añadir nuevos campos en la impresión o crear un nuevo impreso en pocas horas de trabajo.
  Actualmente, las impresoras se cargan con folios en blanco, donde se imprime la información necesaria en cada caso. Esto nos ha permitido centralizar las impresoras (de 6 impresoras matriciales a 2 impresoras laser).
• Mandar por fax los pedidos a proveedor.
  Al ser esta una empresa de fabricación, el número de peticiones a proveedores es muy elevado, siendo uno de los procesos que más tiempo lleva en dedicación al departamento de compras el de la impresión y envio por fax de las peticiones a proveedores.
  Utilizando el programa de Sanface hemos montado el siguiente proceso:
  • Se genera el documento PDF.
  • Se convierte a Postscript utilizando la utilidad de Linux pdf2ps
  • Se envia por fax utilizando el programa Hylafax.
• Guardar en formato PDF los datos contables (Balances, Extractos de cuenta y libros oficiales de Contabilidad).
  Otro de los procesos que hemos conseguido mejorar con este programa es el almacenamiento de la información contable de la empresa de periodos anteriores; consiguiendo además un elevado ahorro en papel y costes de impresión, además de mejorar la búsqueda de información.
  La ley obliga a tener una copia impresa de la información contable de la empresa. Pues bien, en vez de imprimirla en papel, la imprimimos en PDF guardando la información separada, para una posible consulta, en CD-ROM.
• Además de estos procesos, anteriormente comentados, hemos modificado la aplicación desarrollada sobre PICK para permitir que cualquier listado que se pueda imprimir sobre impresora tenga la posibilidad de guardarse en formato PDF, para su posterior revisión en pantalla, o su envio por e-mail o fax directamente desde el ordenador, con el consiguiente ahorro de tiempo, papel o impresora.

Miguel Angel Arribas
apicknet.com

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

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.