AcroDialogs
Increased Accuracy and Efficiency in a Document
Workflow (21 KB
PDF)
Increased Accuracy and Efficiency in a Document
Workflow (HTML)
AcroDialogs and AcroButtons are
used to improve a document workflow, increase
accuracy, and un-clutter forms by using dialogs to
collect user information for an abstracting company
serving the real estate industry.
Accessible Forms White Paper
(440 KB PDF file)
Bryan Guignard, aka The PDF Expert, has authored a White paper
describing a new model for accessible electronic forms
using Acrobat's Dialog Object. Bryan uses
AcroDialogs to help save time and money in creating the
dialogs for his accessible forms.
More information and discussion can be
found at this
Adobe forums posting.
User
Interface Improvements
(PDF)
Shawn Altorio has
created a truly innovative, hyper-interactive PDF, it's
really more of a PDF application than a document.
Shawn uses AcroDialogs for adding a variety of cool
features to his PDF.
Visit Shawn's site, SSA-X2 and check out the PDF
yourself!
AcroButtons/AcroDialogs Business case:
Noah Katz
Workflow Design Analyst
Adobe Certified Expert: Acrobat 4,
5, 6
Background: When buying
a house or other real estate, one of the tasks
required of the title company preparing the
transactional paperwork package is to research the
ownership history of the property. They typically
subcontract this task to a specialist firm doing title
searching or abstracting. These have the people who
locate and print out ownership records, liens,
recording documents, etc. from courthouses and other
data repositories. Their document delivery package is
specified based on varied requirements such as the
turn-around time (due date, dependent on the closing
date of the sale), depth of search, how many owners to
trace back, or how many years to trace back, and many
other factors.
In Maryland, one
abstracting company starts with a printout of the
current ownership of a property from the Maryland
Department of Assessments and Taxation of a Real
Property Data Search from an online state-operated
database. This displays the address, owner, tax
information, etc. They then handwrote notes and
instructions on this printout, and give it to the
individual abstractor to take to the courthouse. This
person then uses the instructions and data on this
paper to assemble the document package. The notations
include instructions such as delivery schedule, depth
of search, number of owners to search, etc., and
metadata such as the internal company file number,
client codes, etc.
In the revised
workflow, the web page report is printed to PDF. Then,
an AcroButton is used that creates form fields
(Acrobat JavaScript doc.addField) in the designated
‘empty’ spaces on the page. Some of these are
formatted with simple borders and designated for notes
to be entered during the records search. Most of the
form fields are intended to display the instructions
or reference data. After the fields are added,
AcroDialogs are passed to the user to get data entry
for populating those fields. The completed page is
printed for distribution to the individual abstractor.
Now, all the instructions have been neatly printed,
ensuring greater clarity and less clutter on the page.
Also, many of the field data elements are selected
from drop-down ‘pick-lists’ allowing for greater
accuracy with fewer typographical errors.
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Business case:
Aspen Systems Corporation
Noah Katz, Development Analyst
Adobe Certified Expert: Acrobat 4, 5, 6
Background: Aspen
Systems is producing documents for search and review
purposes in an investigation. The TIFF images, full
text OCR, and field data abstracted from the documents
(title, author, addressee, copyee, documenttype, date,
etc.) are being loaded into a Concordance database.
There is also a delivery of a subset of the documents,
for use in an independent – even portable – system.
These are provided in PDF format, and each DVD is
indexed with Acrobat Catalog to allow searching the
collections with the free Adobe Reader. Some of the
fielded data is placed in the PDF Document Properties
fields, both standard (Title, Author), and custom
(Addressee, Copyee, DocType, DocNo, Date).
The data, from SQL
database, is ‘injected’ into the PDF files with Apago
PDF Enhancer as part of the enhance stage of the
workflow processing. The specific data for each
document is merged with an template configuration file
(.PEC, an XML file specifying the settings for PDF
Enhancer) already populated with the specified image
compression settings and password security settings.
For quality control,
random PDF files are inspected. I placed an AcroButton
on those workstations to expose the 7 data fields -
with 1 click and no clutter – to the user (available
for Reader or Acrobat). In the event of exception
handling for those files that failed processing
through PDF Enhancer (usually timed out due to file
size of thousands of Searchable Image pages), I put
another button on the workstations (full Acrobat only)
that prompted the user to input the data for each of
those fields (and the custom fields were created by
JavaScript on the fly as part of this data entry
process). The user avoided going to the Adobe
interface, and in fact need not know or care where the
document properties were stored or accessed in a PDF
file.
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Using AcroButtons in a Collaborative Process
Joel Geraci
Adobe Systems
I
use AcroButtons to embed JavaScript in Adobe PDF files
so that I can deliver the functionality as a toolbar
button rather than putting button fields on the PDF
page itself. In one application, I needed my customers
to place either an "Approved" stamp or a "Reviewed"
stamp on a PDF page. The stamps needed to always be
placed in the bottom right corner of the page at a
specific size. The "Approved" stamp needed to replace
an existing "Reviewed" stamp if there was one.
Creating the functionality with JavaScript was easy,
giving users access to it in Acrobat was hard. I used
AcroButtons to create a "Reviewed" and an "Approved"
button along with code that could be embedded in any
PDF. I then created a third button that would embed
the other two buttons in the current PDF with a single
click. I could then send the PDF to my customer and
the new buttons would automatically be available when
they opened my PDF.
AcroButtons made the process
painless.
Before AcroButtons I added this
type of functionality to PDF bookmarks. While that
worked, it wasn't very intuitive for my users. Buttons
are much better.
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