Integration with Enterprise Database Systems Tim Sullivan activePDF, Inc.

The Examples Real problems we’ve encountered Solutions use real products The solution may not be the one they chose The names have been changed to protect the innocent

The Apparel Manufacturer

The Problem 2,500 page catalog Thousands of resellers 100 “area” managers Need to target sales No digital assets Reduce costs in delivery of materials

How they did it manually Area manager would look through a copy of the catalog for merchandise to target Cut the pages and/or pieces out Paste them onto new pages Send to printer for reproduction into saddle stitched books Mail to all resellers in the area

What they wanted to do Let area manager search for merchandise to target Select via a web page the pieces they needed Assemble the pieces into a PDF booklet Add a table of contents with hyperlinks to all resellers

How they did it Scanned all catalog pages into TIFF images and saved into Oracle database as blobs Wrote web page that permitted searching and selection from the database Looped through once to retrieve part numbers, descriptions and determined page numbers

How they did it (pt 2) Used PDFlib ( to generate a PDF page with hyperlinks to pages Re-looped through dataset and for each part number, downloaded TIFF as blob and used PDFLib to import into the PDF ed the resulting PDF using ASPMail (free from

The Business Card Company

The Problem Handled customers with 10,000+ employees Unable to effectively handle different versions of digital assets Turnaround time was 2+ weeks Orders would get lost

How they did it manually Customer would call or fax in an order with the employee’s information Find the folder with the correct “template” Fill in the blanks Generate PostScript Send to the printer for output

What they wanted to do Permit versioning of logos and other digital assets Let customer enter employee information via web page Generate proof PDF After acceptance, send to printer in PDF format

How they did it Implemented Microsoft Visual SourceSafe as versioning tool Rendered digital assets as EPS files Wrote web page to accept employee input Wrote PostScript code to select font and print employee information Injected PostScript code to embed EPS assets (via “Run” command)

How they did it (pt 2) Called JAWS PS to PDF Library to convert PostScript to PDF ( When PDF was completed (checked via exclusive file access), sent to customer via When customer accepts via web page, ed PDF to printer Saved PDF onto file system for billing and audit purposes

The Movie Studio

The Problem Many independent production companies on the lot Centralized scheduling of studio facilities Production companies need all information for scheduling on a daily basis to adjust (and fight for) their schedules Production assistants do not want to run reports

How they did it manually Written as HTML report using Active Server Pages Manually ran report at 3AM using Internet Explorer Printed 1,000 page report to the high speed printer Sent for reproduction and reproduced as many copies as needed Distributed manually to each production office

What they wanted to do Automatically run the HTML report in the morning Convert to PDF to all production offices Permit searching and HTML report generation on a subset of the data (ad-hoc reporting)

How they did it Added page break tags to the HTML generation code Added front end interface for report generation Used activePDF WebGrabber ( to render HTML to PDF WebGrabber automatically ed to distribution list End user Ctrl-F to find their production company and reviewed schedule

The Ticket Seller

The Problem Millions of tickets sold annually Thousands of venues to print tickets for will call Non will-call tickets need to be mailed (and could get lost) Credit card companies require pickup to be same person that purchased tickets

How they did it manually If venue supports it, tickets and receipts printed locally after data transmitted If not, tickets and receipts must be printed remotely and then delivered Requires special ticket “printers” and data lines Have customer produce identification to match against ticket

What they wanted to do Let customer select and purchase tickets online Generate tickets as a PDF Download data only to venue Let venue scan ticket (one scan, one ticket)

How they did it Let customer select and purchase ticket online as usual Use Adobe PDF Library to dynamically generate a “ticket” with a unique barcode Customer prints out PDF using free Acrobat Reader Data only is sent to venues that support technology Any customer holding the ticket is permitted entrance upon scan by venue personnel