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

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 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

June 19, 2001 - Reading time: 6 minutes

About OK Tedi Mining Limited
OK Tedi Mining Limited ("OTML") is a Copper and Gold mining operation in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. OTML revenues last year accounted for approximately 10% of Papua New Guinea GDP.

The problem
The following document is a synopsis of a project OTML commenced in November 2000 and identifies the very positive outcomes for the company and our Vendors.
The project scope was best described as "...a need to develop a more effective method of communicating with our Vendor Base..."
Our active Vendor database numbered over 1500 for the 14 months to February 2001. They accounted for some 56000 Purchase Orders and numerous Requests for Quotation and other facsmile expediting activity in excess of 100,000 transmissions each year. Our success rate in communicating with Vendors was less than acceptable. Our commercial documentation needed to be simplified and made more readable. Communication appeared to be all one way. The cost of our facsimile service was prohibitive.
We've used facsimile as our primary means of communicating with Vendors for some time. The facsimile process is labour intensive and requires paper documents to be handled many times by both parties. Just Imagine the cost in making 100,000 telephone calls each year, most of them metered STD/ISD and multiply that by the number of pages to be transmitted.
Our primary focus at OTML is Mining. We wished to implement a solution that would move us down the "e" path, based on software generally available both within OTML and at the Vendors' place of business. We also wanted a solution that was simple, easy to manage, provided a platform for all of our Vendors, and added value.
The biggest single hurdle was to make the solution flexible. If Vendors did not have email, Commercial documents are sent via facsimile. If Vendors had email then we wanted to send them email with the commercial documents attached.

Why txt2pdf PRO?
We wrote a piece of code (perl) that MIMS (our ERP) treats as a printer. Whenever a document is created in MIMS and that document is directed to a fax device, the perl script applies logic gathered from the ERP and determines the manner in which each document is sent. The document is included as an email attachment. The attachment is generally fixed in its format and content and secure to a point where someone would need to make a conscious effort to interfere with it.
SANFACE Software provided their software called txt2pdf that produces the PDF attachments. We originally installed the shareware version but later procured the Professional Edition to remove some advertising and enable more elaborate formatting features. The txt2pdf resides on our UNIX server. The perl script when it discovers an email message, calls the txt2pdf, includes information on the format the document should take, watermarks, font, text styles, etc., and creates a PDF attachment.
PDF was the chosen format for the attachments as ADOBE Acrobat Readers are very cheap to obtain and install. PDF documents are not readily changeable. PDF will support XML formatting in the near future that we think will provide a future development path should we choose to go that route.
One excellent spin off is that we now use the same technology (email and the SANFACE Software txt2pdf) to run our internal reports. In the past we have run periodic and ad-hoc reports to printers. We now send them to whoever initiated the request via email and in the PDF format. We now make better use of available printing resources and provide a practical and economic means of distributing information company wide or indeed globally.
The cost of the project in total amounted to 10 days of programming and system testing plus the cost of the txt2pdf application. Pay back was inside the first few weeks.

Summary
In the first three months since its introduction we have achieved the following:

• Vendors, representing 80% of our Purchase Order, RFQ and Expediting load are receiving their orders and other commercial documents by email.
• The next 75 Vendors representing up to 90% of the transactional load will be switched over to email by the end of June.
• Success rate on Vendors receiving orders has gone from 95% to 99%. The additional 1% being identified as problems we have yet to resolve internally.
• A significant reduction in our phone account based on the reduction in the number of phones calls made by the facsimile system.
• Order acknowledgments have tripled due to the ease in which email messages are able to be returned. This in itself has created a document management problem we've yet to address.
• Purchase Order duplications have reduced.
• Immediate feedback of non-receipt by the email server which uses better queuing facilities than the facsimile service.
• Vendor acceptance is high.
• We have reduced printed paper consumption both externally and internally by reducing our reliance on printed reports and making better use of the email system.

This is an example of OTML purchase order

Authors
This synopsis was compiled jointly by: