Imaging News — May 2006

Extending the Capabilities of PDF Solutions Without Adobe

Collaboration is becoming an increasingly important requirement for enhancing workflow. As a result companies are relying on PDF to easily distribute, review, and mark-up documents while ensuring consistent layout, fonts and formatting. PDF, as an open standard, is ideal for collaboration because organizations are not limited to Adobe to effectively integrate PDF capabilities into custom applications and workflow processes.

Many software development companies have built libraries and SDKs for multiple platforms, including Java, for reading, writing, and annotating PDF files. Taking advantage of the reading and writing capabilities offered by these tools can reduce the cost and time to develop a flexible solution for viewing or converting PDF.

PDF Reading

Alternative PDF technologies offer features that allow you to build applications that provide end-users with faster access to documents and increased productivity when working with PDF files. These include:

• Integrating PDF reading into an Applet or client-application, without requiring Acrobat to be installed on the client system.
• Support PDF and additional formats, such as MS Word, TIFF, or JPEG Conversion, in a single viewing application.
• Client/Server architecture that can decompress and break up large files on the server enabling a single page to be sent to the client in seconds rather than waiting for the entire file to download.
• Standard PDF features like searching, term highlighting, and text extraction are still available even with these additional functions.

PDF Writing

Similar to PDF reading, using an alternative for PDF writing can provide features that would not be available using Acrobat products. These features can extend the functionality of a custom application that utilizes document formats other than PDF.

• Tools that support conversion to PDF and from PDF provide greater flexibility. Conversion from PDF to TIFF or PDF to JPEG is a common practice for document archiving.
• Direct, batch conversion of files to PDF without manually opening individual documents, invoking a print driver, or creating postscript files significantly reduces time needed to create PDFs from existing documents.

Find out more about PDF SDKs and libraries for Java or Windows DLL, ActiveX, and .NET that can help you reduce costs and time while adding more functionality to your PDF solution.

Product Spotlight

RasterMaster is available for multiple platforms:  Java, Windows, .NET, and Unix. RasterMaster is flexible enough to meet the needs of all your imaging related development projects. Its extensive array of features and functions satisfy your current imaging requirements and future imaging needs including: scanning, viewing, conversion, manipulation, annotation, printing, and saving.

Request an evaluation of a RasterMaster imaging SDK.

Upgrade Now To the Latest Version of Our RasterMaster Imaging SDK

We are excited to announce the release of Version 10 for Java and Version 15 for Windows (DLL, ActiveX, and .NET) as well as UNIX are now available.  This upgrade delivers exciting new features to further enhance your development projects including:

• Term-hit highlighting and text extraction for MS Word, MS Excel, PDF, AFP, and PCL
• Significant improvements to MS Word and PDF Reading
• Reading support for MS Excel and static HTML
• Ability to map user defined fonts in rendering AFP/MODCA file format
• Support for PDF saving with JBIG2 compressionReading support for FileNet annotations

Customers with current maintenance agreements are eligible for a free upgrade.  If you would like to request an upgrade or discuss our maintenance programs, please contact us.

President's Corner

Last week we had the pleasure of meeting many of you at the annual AIIM show. We were surprised to see so many visitors from across the Pacific and the Atlantic. Philadelphia is probably not on the radar for many people but a good trade show has a lot to offer.

One of our favorite activities is to demonstrate to our customers our latest products and features. This year we attracted some of you with our FlexSnap demo. This product is a very powerful web viewer and also a very vivid demonstration of the powerful applets and applications you can build with our RasterMaster for Java.

I wanted also to note that it was very enjoyable to meet with our many exhibitor-customers. It’s so hard to see each other often in person and here is one venue where we can easily do that.

I have to also mention that DataCap, one of our customers, was cleverly combining good deeds with excitement and business. With their bicycle races and their efforts to generate contributions to the Lance Armstrong Foundation by encouraging sponsorships from us and many other document imaging companies, they had a very busy booth and were positively noticed by everyone.

Next Year in Boston! We’ll keep you posted on what we’re planning.

Simon Wieczner, CEO