November 2005

Issue 2

Extend the Power of Mapsoft Plug-ins to a Server Environment

Have you ever wished you could enjoy the power of Mapsoft's Acrobat plug-ins across a server environment? Well now you can! Mapsoft has recently launched its new PDF Workflow Server product which allows you to do exactly that.

Mapsoft PDF Workflow Server is a robust, server-based automation tool which delivers a professional solution for working with Adobe Acrobat’s Portable Document Format (PDF) documents to the server-based network. It uses the power of Mapsoft’s associated desktop (client) product, Automator: a unique automation macro builder tool. Automator enables you to select a combination of Mapsoft’s individual publishing tools and create a sequence of tasks to be performed by those tools. 

Using Mapsoft PDF Workflow Server, task sequences for Mapsoft Impress, BookMarker, TOCBuilder, ImagePlacer, DocuMerger, MaskIt, ContentScaler, MediaSizer, ThumbNails, PageManager, PDFSplitter, OpenOptions, SecuritySetter, InfoSetter, and Flattener can all be deployed and run in a server environment.

Each tool can be added to the sequence list more than once, with different settings each time if required.

PDF Workflow Server will automatically monitor specified watched folders and run the selected task sequences over any PDF files dropped into those folders.

Extend the power of PDF with Mapsoft! Download a free tryout of the new Mapsoft PDF Workflow Server today.

Plugging Plug-ins: Why Third Party Software Matters

Michael Peters, co-founder and director of Mapsoft has written a white paper detailing why third-party plug-ins are so important and what you should look for in choosing a company to provide such plug-ins. 

Any professional racing driver will tell you that there’s no such thing as too much power.  Give them a new, 1000-horsepower engine and after 5 laps, they’ll pull into the pits and say:  “Great, but can you give me 1100bhp?”  It’s just the same with software – especially software that’s as versatile as Adobe Acrobat or PageMaker.  No matter how powerful, flexible or easy-to-use the application, as soon as users get to grips with it, they’ll find it doesn’t quite do exactly what they want it to.  Or they’ll want it to be just that bit easier to do a certain function or perhaps be able to batch a number of functions together. 

This isn’t greed, or customers being niggly – on the contrary, it’s actually a compliment that the original application is proving useful.  It simply underlines that there’s no such thing as the perfect program.

Users will invariably never tell you exactly what they want from the outset.  What they will tell you is the improvements they want on top of what they already have.  And this is where third-party developers and their plug-in products enter the picture. These developers usually start by being close to the user community for a given application. So if a handful of people ask for the ability to be able to mask off an area of a PDF document, to suppress a logo or some kind of sensitive information that they don’t want others to see, there’s a development opportunity to fulfil an emerging need.

It’s this kind of situation that saw the founding of Mapsoft.  By staying close to the Adobe user community, the company has steadily expanded its range of plug-in products to fulfil functional needs and niches of user groups. 

So what should you look for in a third-party developer?  First, does the developer has the endorsement of the main vendor’s partner programme?  This should be considered essential. Mapsoft for example is an Adobe Business Partner and has been developing plug-ins for Adobe products for over 10 years.

Second, how closely tied to the main vendor’s products are the third-party developers’ products?  Mapsoft license and use Adobe’s own core technology in developing plug-ins, to ensure reliability and glitch-free use.  

Third, can you evaluate the product before buying to ensure it does what you want? Free tryout versions of all Mapsoft plug-ins are available from our website, www.mapsoft.com.

And finally, does the third-party developer offer user references and ongoing support for the plug-in?  This is the acid test to prove that the third-party developer is in it for the long haul.  With over 10 years experience in the sector, creating bespoke products for a number of high profile companies such as Network Rail and Xerox, and supplying its own plug-in products to companies such as Bayer and Coca Cola, Mapsoft has proven expertise and commitment to deliver high quality products and support.

Click here for a fuller version of this article.

Software Documentation Does your company documentation need an overhaul? Or perhaps you're launching a new product and need high-quality, easy-to-read and user-friendly documentation to accompany it. If so, Mapsoft can help. Did you know that side-by-side with its enviable position as an acknowledged leader in providing affordable high-quality plug-ins and software development services in the PDF and Acrobat arenas, Mapsoft has built an equally impressive reputation as a provider of high-quality user documentation? Visit our sister web site, www.techauthoring.com, to find out more. We specialise in information: how to organise it, how to present it for maximum effect and, of course, how to write it, so people can easily find and understand the things they need to know. This gives us a unique perspective of our own software tools as not only do we develop and test those tools, our documentation team actually uses them when working on PDFs for clients. So, we really understand what plug-ins need to do to be of use to you. Whether you want new documentation creating, or existing documents re-written, edited or formatted Mapsoft can deliver the solution you need. Our documentation service can even be combined with our  bespoke development service, to give you a total solution to your development need. Mapsoft have recently created new documentation to accompany a large asset management system produced by the Institute of Public Finance (IPF) in the UK. IPF is the management support services company of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountancy. IPF's  asset management system has been designed to assist public sector managers in the management of large and diverse property portfolios. Mapsoft has re-written the documentation accompanying this asset management system to bring it in line with recent upgrades to the software and to present a more cohesive and integrated documentation set. David Brindley of IPF congratulated Mapsoft on the new documentation, saying: "You have done an excellent job under quite difficult circumstances."  He continued: "The new documentation is 100% better than what we had before." Contact Mapsoft for a no obligation chat to discuss your documentation needs, or fill in our Enquiry Form.

Hints & Tips These top tips should help you when using Mapsoft plug-ins: There was a confirmed bug in Acrobat 7 which prevented MaskIt from working properly. If you used MaskIt under Adobe Acrobat 7 you may have noticed problems when viewing masks applied with MaskIt under Acrobat 7 (or when viewing PDF files containing masks that were created using earlier versions of Acrobat). These problems only affected documents viewed on screen: there were no problems when these pages were printed.   The really good news is that this problem has now been fixed in Acrobat 7.0.5! It’s a critical update which is available free of charge from Adobe’s web site to all users of Adobe Acrobat V7 or you may already been notified of this update by Acrobat’s automatic update feature. If you are using Acrobat V7, all you need to do to fix this problem is ensure that the Acrobat 7.0.5 critical update is installed. You do not need another copy of MaskIt: just the new upgrade to Acrobat.   When using Impress or Impress Pro, you may find that text stamps sometimes do not appear. This can be caused by a variety of reasons. Some PDF files are created with a white background behind the text.  Also foreground images may obscure the whole background of the page.  This is particularly true when PDF files are created from scans. In these situations outlined text can be used in the foreground for your text stamps or you make your text stamps transparent. Impress Pro and Impress both support multiple lines of text in a single impression. In the text entry field just use the enter key (return key) to create a new line. The line spacing is defined by setting line spacing. The line spacing value should be the height of the font plus the amount of space that you wish to see between the lines.

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