August 22nd, 2004

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Technology
9 Comments »

Change Management Nightmare

My friend Rob (you may recall his remarkable sunburn) has a technical problem that neither of us could solve. I told him to write it up and I’d post it here, knowing that you all are a smart bunch. Oddly, he’s written it from my perspective, so you should lend no credence to that ‘handsome and successful’ business:

A handsome and successful friend of mine is looking for a solution to a design/printing problem. His company sells their product/service through a distribution channel made up of dealers and resellers. He wants to be able to create template marketing materials (brochures, data sheets, promotion sheets, etc.) and make these templates available so that the dealers/resellers can take the template, add their own logo, and save the file in a printer-ready (read: Kinko’s) format, preferably PDF.

Ideally, the template file would be non-editable except for the logo region. If possible, the solution would be cost-effective, or there would be a way to build a Web-based system for doing this and spitting out the proper print-ready file. Any ideas if Acrobat or other technologies can do this?

Leave any theories in the comments, as he’s a regular reader.

Comments: 9 Responses so far

Boris Mann
August 23rd, 2004
12:07 am

Build a web application that has the dealer upload a logo and edit text, then have it generate a PDF which can be downloaded and/or emailed to the dealer’s email address.

There are “off the shelf” open-source libraries to generate PDF files, so the only work is in creating the web application. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days work for a competent programmer.

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Rick Gebhardt
August 23rd, 2004
7:29 am

Boris beat me to it. That’s what I was going to suggest. While working for St. John’s while I was in college, I did some web work for their prep school. They needed forms filled out by parents and then put into a non-editable form. To do this, I simply made a web form that they could fill out and upon submission, the form information was fed into pdf fields in an already created pdf file. Upon data entry, it was saved as non-editable and returned to the user in a new screen (or it could be downloaded). It’s pretty easy to do.

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Devon
August 23rd, 2004
10:18 am

Heh, I was going to suggest what those two suggested. :)

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Rob
August 23rd, 2004
10:23 am

Thanks everyone!

That was about as close as Darren and I got chatting about it. At a previous company we did this with fax files to add graphics and advertisements, but we used GIMP to do the rendering.

Does anyone have a recommendation for such an open-source, Linux-based PDF library that has worked in the past?

Thanks!

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Rick Gebhardt
August 23rd, 2004
11:01 am

I haven’t worked with anything Linux based. Sorry. I’m solely a Wintel guy.

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Chris
August 23rd, 2004
1:24 pm

ps2pdf is pretty standard and comes with most distros. You’ll need to convert the source file into postscript first, but that’s usually pretty easy. See http://www.pathcom.com/~kujira/pdf_idx.htm for more detail.

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Boris Mann
August 23rd, 2004
1:54 pm

You’ll want the FPDP library, which is pure PHP (as opposed to PDFlib, which requires a fee for commercial usage.

A quick look at Hotscripts finds this $200 PDFReports, which may be a quick way to get started.

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Sue
August 24th, 2004
11:28 am

You’ll want to ask Darren about the software company I mentioned to him via phone today.

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Rob
August 24th, 2004
9:31 pm

Once again – thanks to everyone who has posted here. I have found several possible solutions, but Sue’s “you must call Darren” is the most intriguing so far… I will certainly call him as soon as I’m back in town…

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