Newsletter October 2005, Issue 1. Mapsoft Computer Services Ltd

October 2005

Issue 1

We hope you will enjoy reading this, our first Mapsoft Newsletter. It is packed full of exciting and informative articles relating to Mapsoft, together with Hints & Tips designed to help you work more effectively with PDF, plus news on Mapsoft’s products and special offers.

Mapsoft is an acknowledged leader in providing affordable high-quality plug-ins and software development services in the PDF and Acrobat arenas.

Our products and services can help you maximise your investment in PDF and streamline your workflow.

And all our products and services come with one year’s free technical support as standard so you buy from Mapsoft secure in the knowledge that help is always available should you need it.

Unleash the power of PDF with Mapsoft.

To celebrate the launch of our newsletter we are offering all our readers a free copy of our Acrobat plug-in, Mapsoft DogEars (see opposite). We will offer free products and upgrades in later newsletters too so watch out for your next issue!

Free Copy of DogEars

Mapsoft is offering all readers of our new Newsletter a free copy of Mapsoft DogEars.

DogEars is a publishing tool for use with Adobe Acrobat for marking pages within a document so that you can quickly flip back to them when you require.

Marking an electronic file with dog-ears is analogous to folding pages down in a physical book to mark your place.

Once you mark a page with a dog-ear, a symbol representing a turned-down page is placed on the top-right of that page.

You can now flip through the electronic file just as you could through a printed version of that document, navigating from one dog-ear to the next.

You can also extract all the pages on which dog-ears have been set into a new separate PDF document. (These pages will still remain in the original file too.)

See our movie demo of DogEars!

Special Offer

Download a fully functioning FREE version of DogEars (normal price $99) and start using DogEars today!
But hurry: this special offer is only available until the end of October this year, and from this link above: you will not find this offer on our website.

New Product Launch

Mapsoft has launched its new Plug-in Suite, which combines eighteen of Mapsoft’s most popular PDF plug-ins, including Impress, MaskIt, ImagePlacer, and Automator into one single package.

The Plug-in Suite is the only set of PDF plug-ins you will ever need, offering you a completely interactive and automated solution to your PDF requirements.

Using this new product you can stamp text and graphical images, hide content, change the media size and add bookmarks in PDF files easily and intuitively.

And that’s only the start: click here to learn more.

Bundling these plug-ins together allows us to offer you over $1,700 of products for a very affordable $599.

Download a free tryout today to experience the full power of the Mapsoft Plug-in Suite for yourself.

Speed up your workflow and make Acrobat more efficient.

NEC Europe: Stamping PDF Files using Mapsoft Impress

NEC Europe have been using Mapsoft’s text stamping plug-in Impress since 2001 for stamping text stamps, such as ‘Confidential’, across all the pages in PDF documents. NEC typically stamp these text stamps diagonally across each page, as watermarks with a 10% grey tint.

NEC have recently upgraded to Version 2 of Impress. Although NEC never experienced any trouble using Impress V1, they did find that if stamping watermarks below large diagrams, the diagrams would sometimes hide the watermark from view. Upgrading to Impress V2 solved this issue, as under V2 text stamps can now be transparent, so ensuring document content is always visible.

‘We never had any problems using Impress’ said Rob Irvine of NEC Europe. ‘It always worked.’ He particularly liked the fact that it is possible to save text stamp configurations for later re-use. And after upgrading to V2, he added ‘Impress does everything we want.’

As an added bonus, Irvine was pleased to hear that upgrading to Impress V2 meant that all True Type and Postscript fonts were now supported in text stamps, in addition to the Acrobat base fonts already supported in Impress V1. Irvine had found the range of fonts supported under Impress V1 a little limiting and was delighted to learn that Impress V2 has no such limitations.

Visit our website to learn more about Impress!

New Version of Flattener

A new version of Mapsoft Flattener is now available.

If you’ve ever wished that you could always view mark-up and annotations in PDF files even when using third party viewers or PDAs without ever hiding the original content of the file, then this upgraded plug-in is for you.

Using the new version of Mapsoft Flattener, not only can you flatten mark-up and annotations into the content of PDF files so that you can always view and print that mark-up regardless of the platform you are using, you can even flatten mark-up to a separate layer.

This means that the original content of a PDF file is never hidden in the flattened version of the file. (This can sometimes happen with the current version of Flattener.)

And of course, once mark-up elements and form data have been flattened into the main document content, they can’t be changed. So, if you flatten mark-up to separate layers you have the security of knowing exactly who added what mark-up and when.

And this is all in addition to Flattener’s obvious benefit of dramatically reducing the size of PDF files!

Download a free tryout of the new improved version of Flattener today.

Run the movie demo of the new Flattener!

Mapsoft’s On-line Community

Mapsoft’s new community page is a great place to find up-to-date information on using Mapsoft products.

If you have any general queries or Acrobat-related items you wish to discuss, please post them there.

This new page also gives you the chance to let us know if there are any additional features you would like to see in any of our plug-ins: or even any completely new plug-ins! Have your say. We'd love to hear from you!

Hints & Tips

These top tips should help you when using Mapsoft plug-ins:

There was a problem in Impress and Impress Pro when using foreign language characters and the Acrobat base fonts such as Times, Helvetica and Courier. This has been fixed in Impress V2.0.1 and Impress Pro V2.1.3.

Contact Mapsoft for free updates (from Impress V2 and Impress Pro V2.1).
When flattening files using Mapsoft Flattener, we advise you to always add any comments into the file that is to be flattened using the Free Text tool rather than Notes tool.

This is because Notes are flattened in their un-opened state, so just the Note icon is visible in the flattened version of the file rather than the actual text of the Note. Adding notations using the Free Text tool rather than the Notes tool will solve this problem.
Tryout versions of all Mapsoft plug-ins are available from our website. These tryouts are all completely free. Download and try them out for yourself with no obligation to buy.

All are fully functioning versions of Mapsoft plug-ins but some print a ‘Tryout’ stamp across files modified using these plug-ins, while others expire after a set number of days.
When using Impress or Impress Pro, you may find that text stamps sometimes disappear from the top or bottom of pages within PDF files which contain variable sized pages.

In this situation it is important to ensure that the calculations for the positioning of an impression are done either from the top, bottom, left or right of the page. The PDF co-ordinate system works from the bottom left-hand corner of the page. For this reason footers should always be calculated from the bottom: headers from the top.
Many of Mapsoft’s plug-ins can be combined together in a single batch operation across single or multiple files, when used with Mapsoft’s powerful automation plug-in, Automator.

For example, you might want to mask existing page numbering information found across a series of files using MaskIt, and then use Impress to stamp new sequential page numbering across all the files in that series.

Address: Mapsoft Computer Services Ltd, 5 Victoria Place, The Promenade, Kingsbridge, Devon TQ7 1JG United Kingdom
Copyright © Mapsoft Computer Services Limited 2005 . All Rights Reserved. All trademarks are acknowledged.