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EDMS

Electronic Document Management Systems...

  1. Required Components
  2. Capturing Paper Documents
  3. Saving B&W Faxes to PDF
  4. Building a Graphics Production Workflow

Many of the most important documents within companies are NOT already digital files. These documents are assets of the company representing final packaged results of countless manhours of labor.

There are numerous pros and cons to the various ways that digital information can be delivered to the user. For a brief comparison of formats directly usable by most Web browsers and/or their plug-ins (HTML, Java/ActiveX, PDF, and TIFF) see an article compiled by The Xenos Group.

There are two predominant ways to convert paper documents into digital files:

  1. Scanning the document for a bitmap rendition saved as a digital file (PDF offering one image format option).
  2. Capturing the document for content with OCR software or Adobe Capture® - here the text of a document would be "read" and converted into word processing text.

Scanning to Bitmaps

Scanning for a bitmap usually precedes character recogition conversion. For some organizations it makes sense to use a system to convert huge reams of information without capturing the content. Scanning is easy, indexing is hard and labor intensive.

Bitmap files can be saved as PDF directly and there are a variety of options available for reducing the size of PDF image files. The Xenos Group has detailed documentation of some of the options available for reducing and optimizing PDF image files (short of Capturing them). They even have a PDF document of their results (64K).

Capturing Bitmap Scans to PDF

Virtually every organization has documents for which scanning for content is desireable because the text needs to be searchable and possibly cross-referenced to other documents in more detail than manhour indexing will accomplish. Plus, text files take up much less storage capacity than their bitmap renditions.

OCR scanning reads the document for content and saves the text as a word processing or text file.

Capture® software goes much further. It scans the page for content but also scans for font, bolding and italics, layout of the document, and bitmap images. It then saves the result as a PDF document.

Adobe Acrobat Exchange® features a Capture plug-in that can be used for small capturing projects. This plug-in is not to be confused with the Adobe Capture® program which is designed to be used as an industrial capacity utility for converting reams of documents to PDF. Its features are described in a different section of this website.

1. Required Components
  • A scanner that can make 200dpi scans
  • Minimum system requirements
  • Acrobat Exchange® software (which is a program module of the Adobe Acrobat software suite
  • Capture Plug-in is a part of Acrobat Exchange (NOTE: downloadable versions of this plug-in are available from the Adobe Acrobat site to registered owners of the program if they purchased the 3.x version before the plug-in was available for shipment).
  • Acrobat Catalog® for cataloging and indexing files
  • Acrobat Reader® for opening converted files
  • Acrobat Exchange® for conducting cross document indexed searches and for recomposing pages from different sources into new documents

NOTE: The Capture Plug-in described here is not to be confused with the full program sold by Adobe called Capture®. Its features and utility is described in a different section of this website.

Component Availability

PDFWriter, Acrobat Distiller®, Catalog, Reader, and Exchange are modules of the Adobe Acrobat package that can be purchased directly via mail order for about $200.

2. Capturing Paper Documents

Verify that you have the Capture plug-in installed under the Document menu of Acrobat Exchange®.

  • If not, it may not have been available at the time you purchased Acrobat 3.x. Check Adobe Acrobat's website by CLICKING HERE.
  • Install the downloaded plug-in per the attached instructions.

Make a grayscale scan of your target document at 200-600dpi. Save it as a TIFF file (at 300dpi, 256 grays, the resulting lettersize page is about 6.9Mb).

Open a PDF document in Exchange.

Select Import/Image in the File menu and choose the TIFF format file. At this point you can elect to either append the current PDF document with the scanned page or create a new PDF document. (The converted 6.9Mb TIFF file reduces to about 3.3Mb).

Select Document/Capture Pages and the program will perform a complicated set of tasks to produce the final PDF file. (The resulting PDF file, depending upon the content of the original, will reduce to as little as 27K).

The images of "suspects" will be retained along with the program's best guess concerning the character recognition of the source document. Go to Edit/Find First Suspect to initiate finding and correcting suspects. Using the Adobe Capture program, there are a number of different PDF modes that the file can be saved in.

Modify the file in Adobe Acrobat Exchange®:

  1. Open Exchange and edit your files - add other pages, crop, rotate, create links and bookmarks, append notes, etc.
  2. "Save As" an optimized file and add security passwords if desired. Optimizing reduces the size of the PDF file and adds byteserving (a.k.a., linearization) - which means that the end user will be downloading files one page at a time while the full document downloads in the background.

Catalog the files using Adobe Acrobat Catalog®.

The end user can open the individual files in Adobe Reader® (free) or in Adobe Exchange®. Exchange also allows the user to conduct searches across many documents through indexes created in Catalog®.

3. Saving B&W Faxes to PDF

A little known capability of Acrobat Exchange is its ability to open electronic faxes (saved in the G-IV compression format) and save them as image PDFs. This would allow the user to combine faxed information with other PDFs for distribution as email or through EDMS systems. To achieve this, simply Import/Image from Exchange's File menu and select the fax file you wish to convert.

4. Building a Graphics Production Workflow

Many corporations are launching massive Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) for converting paper documents into digital form. Below is a JPEG of a production workflow diagram for the production of a single distributable PDF document starting with paper and digital source documents. The entire project is password protected. Contact Performance Graphics for more details concerning our consultation on this project.

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a production of Performance Graphics
©1998 The Miller De Wulf Corporation