To replace paper copies of monthly cost accounting system invoices

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.