easyConverter Desktop

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easyConverter Desktop

$19.95

Convert PDF to Word, saving you hours of retyping text!

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PDF to Word Converter
Convert PDF to Word, saving you hours of retyping text!
With easyConverter Desktop you can convert the PDF into Word while preserving the table formatting, which can be copied to Excel for further editing.
This product may NOT be able to produce an editable Word document if one of the following conditions applies to your PDF:
    • Your PDF was created by a scanner
    • Your PDF has security restrictions
    • Your PDF is a form

 
Conversion Samples 
PDF Document
[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document
[zoom] [download RTF ]
PDF Document
[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document
[zoom] [download RTF ]
Conversion Samples
  • Table of Data
  • Newsletter
  • Prospectuses
  • Table of Content
  • IRS Booklet
Table of Data
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document (RTF)
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[zoom] [download RTF ]
 
Newsletter
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document (RTF)
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[zoom] [download RTF ]
 
Prospectuses
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document (RTF)
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[zoom] [download RTF ]
 
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document (RTF)
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[zoom] [download RTF ]
 
Table of Content
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document (RTF)
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[zoom] [download RTF ]
 
IRS Booklet
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
Word Document (RTF)
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[zoom] [download RTF ]
 
BCL easyConverter SDK
PDF-to-Word Programming APIs
easyConverter SDK allows development of robust, multi-threaded systems that can be easily scaled for enterprise class applications.
Easy to Use: Write PDF-to-Word Apps With Just 2 Lines of Code
BCL easyConverter SDK hides the complexity associated with converting PDF to Word into as little as 2 lines of code.
  • 1 | Set oConverter = CreateObject("EasyConverter.PDF2Word.3")
  • 2 | oConverter.ConvertToWord("C:\input.pdf", "C:\output.doc")
Works with Many Programming Languages
By putting easyConverter SDK in a fully compliant COM Object wrapper, it allows programmers to create, manipulate, and modify PDF documents with any language that supports COM Objects. Languages that can access BCL’s COM Object based easyConverter SDK include:
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0
  • Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0
  • Microsoft Visual C++ .NET
  • Microsoft Visual Basic .NET
  • Microsoft Visual C# .NET
  • Microsoft VBScript, ASP, and ASP.NET
  • Any programming language that supports ActiveX/COM/OLE
Thread-Safe and Scalable
BCL easyConverter SDK allows development of robust, multi-threaded systems that can be easily scaled for enterprise class applications. Robust exception handling allows programmers to develop applications that run nonstop 24 x 7.
WIth easyConverter SDK, PDF documents can be converted:
  • from File to File
  • from File to Memory
  • from Memory to Memory
Programmatically Convert PDF to Word
Quickly write C#, VB, ASP, C++ programs to convert your PDF to Word for:
  • Server and web applications
  • Converting PDF to produce editable documents
  • Data mining PDF documents
  • Folder watchers
  • Populating databases from PDF
  • Publishing PDF documents in Word
List of PDF to Word APIs
  • Convert PDF to Word with just 2 lines of code
Set oConverter = CreateObject("EasyConverter.PDF2Word.3")
oConverter.ConvertToWord("C:\input.pdf", "C:\output.doc")
Method: ConvertToWord Convert a PDF document to an RTF document.
Method: ConvertToWord2 Convert a PDF document to an RTF stream. The RTF output is stored in memory.
Method: ConvertToWord3 Convert a PDF stream to RTF stream. Both input and output are coming from memory stream.
Property: ConnectHypens (new) Set the option to connect hyphenated words. For English language only.
Property: ConvertBookmarks (new) Set the option to convert bookmark for PDF files when converting to RTF files.
Property: OcrOption (new) Set the option for handling OCR-ed documents.
Property: RemoveHiddenText (new) Set the option to remove hidden text.
Property: SaveAsDoc (new) Set the option to save as native .DOC file using Word automation.
Property: FileConversionTimeOut File conversion timeout value (in milliseconds).
Property: NumberOfPages Get the total number of pages from the input PDF.
Property: JpegQuality Set the quality of the JPEG images inside the RTF output.
BCL easyConverter SDKWord Version
Programmatically Convert PDF to HTML
Quickly write C#, VB, ASP, C++ programs to convert your PDF to HTML for:
  • Publishing PDF documents on to Web sites
  • Parsing PDF with HTML parsing engines
List of PDF to HTML APIs
  • Convert PDF to HTML with just 2 lines of code
Set oConverter = CreateObject("EasyConverter.PDF2HTML.3") oConverter.ConvertToHTML("C:\input.pdf", "C:\output.html") Method: ConvertToHTML Convert a PDF document to an HTML document.
Property: FileConversionTimeOut File conversion timeout value (in milliseconds).
Property: JpegQuality Set the quality of the JPEG images inside the HTML output.
Property: NumberOfPages Get the total number of pages from the input PDF.
Property: AbsolutePositioning Set the option to create HTML file using absolute positioning textboxes.
Conversion Samples
  • Product Usermanual
  • Financial Table
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
HTML Document
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[zoom] [view HTML ]
 
Financial Table
PDF Document
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[zoom] [download PDF]
HTML Document
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[zoom] [view HTML ]
 
Success Stories
PDF Document Creation
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Australian Railroad Track Corporation
  • TaxWorks
  • World's Leading Ticketing Company
Data Extraction
  • Adobe
  • MSWireless
Data Mining
  • IBM
Document Manipulation
  • Rogers Medical Intelligence Solutions
Document Format Conversion
  • R.R. Donnelley
Document Usability and Readability
  • SONY
Data Searching
  • Abbott Laboratories
 
Northrop Grumman
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Customer: Northrop Grumman Customer Application: Automated PDF Conversion and Merging of Multi-language Word Files. Developer: Bernard Fazzini BCL Product Used: easyPDF SDK Development Environment: C#.NET PDF creation using easyPDF SDK
Overview of Company and Application
Northrop Grumman Corporation is a global defense company in systems integration, defense electronics, information technology, advanced aircraft, shipbuilding, and space technology. The company has more than 125,000 employees and operates in 25 countries. Northrop has multi-language Word files that need to be converted to PDF and merged while retaining the exact look of the Word originals. They must be accessed from multiple sites under high-security IT operating conditions
Challenge (Business and Technology)
Northrop Grumman has document files in foreign languages and their English translations in WORD files. Northrop wanted merged PDF files to be created that would show each foreign language page and its English translation page next to each other in the merged PDF file. Theses PDF files also needed to:
  • Have all necessary fonts (foreign and English) embedded in the PDF file
  • Look exactly like the originals
  • Be accessible to a few hundred users from multiple locations
  • Run on servers without human intervention
  • For security purposes, run without people being logged into the applications. The PDF application needed to call the application as a service rather than requiring people to be constantly logged into the applications, something that the security requirements did not permit.
  • Comply with other very high security requirements
PDF Tool Selection
Bernard Fazzini:
“We evaluated Adobe, ActivePDF, JawsPDF and other PDF tools. We searched for two months, Googled every site, evaluated all the PDF conversion tools out there. Only BCL’s easyPDF SDK could meet all our requirements. We now have it deployed in 11 sites.”
Northrop Grumman chose BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK for its:
  • Functionality
“BCL’s easyPDF was the only tool that could run by itself without human intervention and without requiring people to be logged into the applications.”
“easyPDF produced PDF exactly like the original files with embedded fonts.”
“easyPDF merged documents keeping the desired pagination intact.”
  • Ease of Use, Coding and Development
“easyPDF is the easiest product to code against that we found.”
“easyPDF is very easy to program. We definitely like it.”
 
Adobe
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Product: Adobe Acrobat® Table/Formatted Text
Developed by BCL Technologies for Adobe Systems Incorporated, a premier provider of award-winning software solutions for Network Publishing, including Web, print, video, wireless and broadband applications.
The Company
Adobe Systems helped launch the desktop publishing revolution in 1982, and remains at the heart of the next publishing revolution, Network Publishing. Network Publishing is about making reliable, visually rich information available to anyone, anywhere on any device. Adobe continues to set standards in Web, print and video publishing by driving the delivery of compelling content regardless of platform or device. Today, Adobe continues to build award-winning software solutions for Network Publishing, including Web, print, video, wireless and broadband applications.
The Challenge
Adobe Portable Document Format, or PDF, is a universal file format that preserves fonts, formatting, graphics, and colors of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. It is a final format, in the sense that it is designed for viewing and printing, rather than editing.
Adobe found that while people loved the consistent, rich, and portable document view that PDF provided, the inabilities to extract objects such as text, tables, and graphics were serious concerns for end-users from a wide range of industries, such as pharmaceutical and financial industries, that relied heavily on PDF documents.
BCL's Solution
With its extensive expertise in the field of PDF, BCL realized that the challenge Adobe Systems faced lied in the fundamental document structure of PDF, which contained little or no content structural information. This meant that objects such as graphics, tables and paragraphs, while defined in other document-authoring packages, were simply a collection of text items in PDF.
With that understanding, BCL developed a patented technology that detected table and paragraph structures in PDF. The development led to an award-winning Acrobat plug-in that allowed users to extract information from PDF with the document structure completely intact. This technology has been incorporated by Adobe Systems, and is now an invaluable feature of Adobe Acrobat 4.0 and 5.0.
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IBM
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Product: IBM PDF to ASCII File Converter
Developed by BCL Technologies for IBM, a leading company in hardware and software technology.
The Company
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) uses advanced information technologies to provide solutions for their customers. The Company offers a variety of solutions, including systems, products, services, software and financing. IBM's three hardware product segments are comprised of Technology, Personal Systems and Enterprise Systems. Other major operations consist of a Global Services segment, a Software segment, a Global Financing segment and an Enterprise Investments segment.
The Challenge
IBM regularly receives circuit board drawings in PDF format. Although accurate and precise in displaying the document, these PDF files are not compatible with IBM's existing document management systems. In order to archive and index the PDF document in the system, they need a solution that systematically and automatically extracts image and textual information from these documents and imports them into a database.
BCL's Solution
Since IBM required an automated process, BCL first developed an "intelligent" solution that analyzed each PDF document automatically. The software would identify and break down the document content into 3 categories: text, tables and graphics. A converter was developed to output the processed PDF content into ASCII. With careful planning and precise algorithms, the output was produced with over 98% accuracy, recorded by extensive testing from both IBM and BCL. With BCL's PDF to ASCII Converter, IBM was able to catalog thousands of circuit board drawings in their document management system on a daily basis.
 
MSWireless
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MS Wireless targets over $500K annual savings with BCL Custom PDF Technology
  • Customer: Mobile Systems Wireless
  • Customer Application: Data Extraction & Comparison from PDF Forms
  • Developer: Chris Babiasz, Senior Software Engineer. Carl Matthias, IT Mgr.
  • BCL Product Used: easyPDF SDK with custom technology enhancements
  • Development Environment: Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET) and ASP.NET
  • Operating Systems used: Microsoft Windows Server 2003
  • Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2000
  • Deployment Type: Server Application Deployment
Overview of Company
Mobile Systems Wireless is a leading independent reseller for Cingular Wireless. Eleven years ago, Mobile Systems Wireless started out with a modest kiosk in the Plaza Camino Real Mall in Carlsbad California. It now has 54 stores in the West Coast and is one of the largest generators of new activations for Cingular Wireless.
Challenge (Business and Technology)
Mobile Systems Wireless used to manually extract sales order information from PDF files and match it to their own POS database for data consistency in verifying sales and paying sales commissions. The high volume of orders required 15-20 employees for this work. They were always 1-2 weeks behind, which delayed uncovering of inconsistencies in reported sales and increased instances of fraud in the field.
Mobile Systems Wireless wanted to automate this process, cut processing costs and time, and deter fraud. They needed specialized PDF technology to:
  • Analyze the PDF order form, identify fields and map those to database fields
  • Automatically and accurately extract data from PDF files and write to database
  • Automatically compare the data extracted from PDF files against their POS system data and flag any inconsistencies in specific orders
BCL Technologies' Solutions
Mobile Systems Wireless turned to the PDF experts at BCL Technologies to solve their specialized PDF technology needs. BCL responded with custom PDF technology:
  • PDF Forms Mapping Tool, to analyze a PDF form and identify its data fields. The Tool is flexible enough to create new mappings when PDF forms change.
  • PDF data extraction technology to accurately extract data from PDF forms, write it into the database, and run comparisons against the POS data.
Mobile System Wireless implemented the solution and saw immediate dramatic results. Its processing time dropped from 1-2 weeks to 1-2 days and the work force was reduced from 15-20 employees down to 4-5 employees. Annualized savings in employee costs alone exceeded $500K, not even counting the substantial savings from reduced fraud.
We chose BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK because:
  • Experts in PDF technology
    “We use easyPDF SDK technology for PDF conversion and it works very well. We knew BCL is a solid company. We have also looked at several competitors and tried to use their products, but we like easy PDF SDK the best. When we talked to BCL Technologies’ design engineering team, we knew they had the knowledge and confidence to solve our problems.” Chris Babiasz
  • Responsive & Creative Sales and Engineering Teams
    “The sales and design engineering teams have always been very responsive -- very enthusiastic to help us out and creative in coming up with solutions.” Chris Babiasz
    “This is the first time for us to develop a project of this magnitude. It is an ongoing process and BCL Technologies always came through with a working solution.” Carl Matthias
  • Ease of Use, Coding, and Development
    “This was a complicated custom project but it only took us 2 engineers to develop the application, given BCL tools and technology.” Carl Matthias
 
World's Leading Ticketing Company
[Company Name Withheld]
BCL Technologies’ easyPDF SDK delivers PDF creation capabilities to  this global ticketing company’s 5000 users as a highly scalable, stable web server application. The development team had previously used ActivePDF and were unhappy with it. They had found ActivePDF hard to set up, unstable and not scalable.
  • Customer: World’s leading ticketing company [Company Name Withheld]
  • Customer Application: Web-based Financial & Business Reporting
  • Users: 5000 user accounts
  • BCL Product Used: easyPDF SDK
  • Development Environment: ASP.net 1.1, C#
  • Operating System: Microsoft Windows Server 2003
  • Database Server: Oracle 9i
  • Deployment Type: Web Server Application Deployment
Overview of Company
World's leading ticketing company, operating across US, Europe, South America, selling event tickets through one of the largest e-commerce Internet sites, thousands of retail outlets, and worldwide call centers, needed to embed PDF capabilities in its reporting applications for its worldwide user base.
Challenge (Business and Technology)
The customer wanted to deploy a web-based reporting system for its 5000 worldwide user accounts, 70% of whom are daily users. Users wanted output of reports in multiple formats, including PDF. The customer needed to implement a PDF SDK product in a web server deployment that had the performance, stability, and scalability to service such a large dispersed user base. The developers wanted something that was easy to program and implement.
The development team had previously used ActivePDF and were unhappy with it. They had found ActivePDF hard to set up, unstable and not scalable.
  • The developer had tried to configure ActivePDF on 5-6 servers and had run into configuration problems every time; it never worked the first time and error messages were hard to understand and troubleshoot, eating up valuable developer time.
  • In operation, ActivePDF had proven to be unstable; its print service would start giving errors after operating for some time and had to be regularly reset, requiring IT monitoring and associated costs for such monitoring and resetting.
  • Scalability was the biggest issue; ActivePDF would start blocking concurrent users from the system. It would queue users starting after just 4 users, and additional users would start experiencing long queuing times and time-outs. Ideally, the system needed to handle 10-15 concurrent users without any degradation to service the large 5000 account base, and ActivePDF could not do so.
Selection of BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK
The development team searched online and downloaded trial versions of many products. They found everything they needed in BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK. Their comments about easyPDF SDK:
  • Setup:“easyPDF SDK setup was very straightforward, unlike our experience with other products. We wrote just a few lines of code to start using it.”
  • Stability: “easyPDF has now been deployed for a year and we have been very happy with it.”
  • Scalability: “easyPDF has handled the 5000 user base without any issues. We have not encountered any user queuing or blocking.”
Strong Endorsement for easyPDF SDK:
“Now that we have experienced the ease of programming, stability and performance of BCL’s easyPDF SDK we will use it for all our future PDF projects.”
 
Tax Works logo
  • Customer: TaxWorks
  • Customer Application: ARKWORKS Document Storage & Management System (http://www.ark-works.com/)
  • Developer: Shaun Hess, Software Architect
  • BCL Product Used: easyPDF SDK
  • Development Environment: Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET) PDF creation using easyPDF SDK
Overview of Company and Application
TaxWorks has been a professional tax software industry leader for over 30 years, rated #1 since 1972 by leading publications, associations and customers. Taxworks is now marketing a new document management and archival system, ArkWorks. Its 6000 Beta versions have been sent out as of 1Q 2006, using BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK as its PDF creation and manipulation engine.
Challenge (Business and Technology)
ArkWorks selected PDF as the common document format for storing and sharing documents across various applications. ArkWorks needed the ability to:
  • Convert printable document type to PDF format
  • Catalog MS Office documents in PDF or native format
  • Scan and catalog paper documents
  • Add text notes and/or annotations to PDF documents
  • Email any documents
PDF Tool Selection
Shaun Hess:
“We evaluated many PDF tools and drivers, including Blackice, Cutepdf, Activepdf, etc. We even wrote our own. Except for BCL’s easyPDF SDK, all had limitations we couldn’t live with. Some only converted from MS Office and not very well. Others could not do annotation or text stamping on PDF documents. None were as easy to use and as easy to integrate.”
“We selected easyPDF SDK as our solution for many reasons.”
TaxWorks chose BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK for its:
  • Functionality
“If you can print it, you can convert it with easyPDF SDK. Prints from any application into PDF.”
“We can do Text Stamping and Annotation of PDF documents that we couldn’t with other SDKs.”
“PDF conversion is great!”
  • Ease of Use, Coding and Development
“It took very little amount of coding, 10-15 lines of code, to integrate easyPDF SDK into our application.”
“We haven’t had to change BCL code once!”
 
Australian Railroad Track Corporation (ARTC)
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  • Customer: Australian Railroad Track Corporation (ARTC)
  • Customer Application: Automated PDF creation from .doc and .xls via form-based file upload
  • Developer: Chris Jones
  • BCL Product Used: easyPDF SDK
  • Development Environment: Active Server Pages deployed on IIS 6 on Microsoft 2003 server
Overview of Company and Application
Australian Rail Track Corporation Ltd (ARTC) is a company under the Corporations Act whose shares are owned by the Commonwealth and overseen by the Australian Minister for Transport and Regional Services and Minister for Finance and Administration on behalf of the Commonwealth. ARTC is responsible for negotiating new access to the interstate national track between Brisbane and Perth, and improving performance and efficiency of interstate rail infrastructure.
Challenge (Business and Technology)
ARTC needs to automate the Creation of PDF documents for Excel and Word documents that are uploaded to it's Intranet via form based file upload.
ARTC chose BCL Technologies easyPDF SDK for its:
  • Functionality
“BCL easyPDF SDK integrates well with .NET and classic ASP. The document conversion process is very quick compared to others that I had tried (ActivePDF and VeryPDF).”
  • Ease of Use, Coding and Development
“BCL easyPDF SDK installation was simple and well documented. I found the SDK easy to follow and the coding that was required was minimal.”
  • Affordable
“The software licensing model is simple and affordable.”
 
SONY
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PDF Schematic Tracing
Developed by BCL Technologies for SONY Electronics Inc., a leading manufacturer of audio, video, communications, and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets.
The Company
SONY Electronics Inc. in North America represents the largest single geographical operation of the SONY Corporation with nearly $11 billion in sales. SONY Electronics employs approximately 20,000 people in North America. Operations include manufacturing and engineering, design, sales, marketing, distribution, systems integration and customer service of electronics and recording media products for the consumer, IT, broadcast, commercial and institutional market segments.
The Challenge
Between 1994 and 1998, SONY migrated all of their repair manuals, schematics, diagrams, and documentation to PDF in order to reduce printing and distribution costs. Although this initiative effectively saved the company time and money, they soon found that the electronic format had several disadvantages. PDF was not suitable for displaying complex schematics because they were difficult to view on a monitor. Users were unable to trace the countless connecting lines between components, or to determine a part’s description.Navigating the content in the PDF files was a great challenge and it took an enormous amount of time. Furthermore, the average document size ranged from 150 to 175 pages, so it was counterproductive to require users to print the schematics and physically highlight the connections. By 2004, it was evident that SONY needed a method to help make their documentation readable and easier to view.
BCL’s Solution
BCL created a PDF Schematic Tracing tool that automatically highlights the connections between components, and associates them with their part descriptions directly in the PDF manual. This Adobe Acrobat Plug-In allows SONY to pre-process their manuals so that engineers, repair personnel and support technicians can quickly trace the connections in complex schematics. By simply clicking on a connecting line in Acrobat, the entire path is highlighted in red or blue, making them easier to trace. Hyperlinks are embedded in each component, and clicking them will jump to the description and part number described later in the documentation. By implementing the PDF Schematic Trace tool, SONY was able to continue using their paperless distribution methods to deliver detailed, easy-to-read manuals through their Electronic Service Information (ESI) subscription channel.
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ROGERS
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Product: BCL Rogers Jade
Developed by BCL Technologies for Rogers Medical Intelligence Solutions, a leading provider of timely and trusted information and insights on the latest medical and clinical research
The Company
Rogers Medical Intelligence Solutions (Rogers MIS) provides timely and trusted information and insights on the latest medical and clinical research. Rogers MIS has built an unparalleled database of clinical information covering a broad range of medical specialties and therapeutic areas. Medical experts evaluate the results of new studies as they are presented around the world. Pharmaceutical and BioTech companies rely on Rogers MIS to keep them apprised of the latest findings on the treatment of human disease and developments affecting their businesses. Rogers MIS has published more than 10 million newsletters and reports to physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals around the world, each one helping to build awareness of the newest treatment options and trends being presented by their colleagues at medical meetings. For research, education and market information, Rogers Medical Intelligence Solutions is the source for clinical information.
The Challenge
On a daily basis, Rogers MIS aggregates the content of clinical findings presented at medical society proceedings from around the world for analysis by its database search engine technology.The information arrives in various media formats. Many sources employ layouts where an individual piece of content may wrap across columns or pages. Rogers MIS needed a method to demarcate the beginning of each piece of content for presentation to its ingestion and content storage systems. The challenge was to batch export each piece of content as a single page graphic file for analysis by OCR workflow connected to relational database and content storage systems.
BCL's Solution
BCL created BCL Rogers Jade, a graphic file extractor based on its standard Jade product. This Adobe Acrobat Plug-In allows Rogers MIS personnel to to easily draw the boundaries of thousands of medical meeting articles within a single PDF file, even if they extend across multiple columns or pages. After all the articles have been delineated, with a click of a mouse button, BCL Rogers Jade exports high resolution TIFF files into the work flow system. In the first six months since implementing its new technologies beginning in January, Rogers MIS captured and analyzed word-for-word 150,000 medical articles, aided substantially by the use of BCL Rogers Jade.
 
Abbott Laboratories
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Product: Abbott Search
Developed by BCL Technologies for Abbott Laboratories, a leading provider of pharmaceutical products and services.
The Company
For more than a century, Abbott Laboratories has been working to advance health care for people around the world. Founded in 1888, Abbott Laboratories has evolved into a diversified health care company that discovers, develops, manufactures and markets innovative products and services that span the continuum of care - from prevention and diagnosis to treatment and cure. Headquartered in north suburban Chicago, Abbott helps people around the world in more than 130 countries. Building leadership and combining strengths in the various areas of health care has enabled Abbott to provide total, integrated solutions across the health care spectrum for some of the world's most prevalent medical conditions, including AIDS, cancer and diabetes.
The Challenge
Abbott Laboratories stores its medical and research information in a PDF database. Many of these documents contain vital facts and figures that are frequently required for research purposes. One of the biggest challenges they face is allowing end-users to conduct searches for key words or terms over the company's intranet.
BCL's Solution
BCL developed a solution that greatly enhanced the search features within Abbott Laboratories' existing PDF database. Based on Adobe Acrobat® and Acrobat® Reader™, BCL designed "Abbott Search," a plug-in that works within Acrobat's browser. Through Abbott Search, an end-user would be able to search for a particular term or word within a PDF document. The results were 100% accurate and instant. Additional navigation features were added to further facilitate the searching process.
 
RR Donnelley
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Product: Donnelley Jade
Developed by BCL Technologies for Donnelley Financial Group, a leading financial printer of SEC compliant documents in EDGAR II HTML and EDGAR ASCII format.
The Company
Headquartered in Chicago Illinois, with regional offices throughout the world. R.R. Donnelley Financial (RRFD) provides premier information management and printing services to the worldwide business community. State-of-the-art technology combined with process expertise, results in total solutions for the document management and distribution needs of their customers. Using the latest in digital communication to link their worldwide network of production facilities. This, plus the capability to implement solutions in both paper and electronic formats, helps them communicate effectively and efficiently with their customers.
The Challenge
RRDF was faced with the challenge of reducing turnaround time for conversion of native Desktop (DTP) documents to the appropriate EDGAR II HTML and EDGAR ASCII formats for filing with the SEC. The challenge was to utilize Adobe® Acrobat®'s PDF capabilities while also allowing for extraction and conversion of content into editable HTML 3.2 and ASCII file formats, with or without graphics.
BCL's Solution
In November 1999, RRDF's Integration Engineering Team awarded a contract to Santa Clara-based BCL Technologies (BCL) for the development of a software solution. Together, RRDF and BCL developed Donnelley Jade.
Donnelley Jade is designed to maximize efficiency in the data conversion process. It converts PDF files into SEC-compliant EDGAR II HTML and RTF for RRDF's EDGAR ASCII filing purposes. In addition, it is capable of converting PDF documents into standard Web HTML and RTF files, giving it the potential to serve as a powerful data conversion tool for other R.R. Donnelley work groups.
Donnelley Jade converts PDF files (or any native or postscript file format that can be converted into PDF) into SEC-compliant EDGAR II HTML 3.2. Using a unique "zoning" technology patented by BCL, it takes graphically complex SEC-related financial documents and automatically separates their structures into zones. (Each zone consists of a single element -- a graphic, piece of text, list or table.) The software can then either automatically sequence the zones into a natural reading order or allow users to fine tune or re-sequence (or both) them using a zone editor before outputting them to searchable, downloadable, SEC-compliant HTML 3.2.
"Donnelley Jade already has proven itself," says Joe Raza, Project Manager for Donnelley Jade. "We have reduced our turnaround times for SEC filing of non-proprietary (CFS and ProFile) documents by 75 percent." RRDF accomplishes this by writing native DTP documents into PDF format, then using Donnelley Jade to do the final conversion. In addition to converting PDF files to EDGAR II HTML 3.2, it can be used to extract text, tables and graphics from PDF files into RTF in order to recreate the documents in DTP or proprietary applications. It can also be used as an intermediate process file conversion tool for converting client-supplied DTP (or PDF) files to Web HTML via RTF.
Because users can employ the zone editor to either fine tune or re-sequence (or both) the zones before a document is converted, Donnelley Jade allows for a great degree of control over the output without having to resort to an HTML editor to refine the document's final appearance. "This software prevents complex PDF documents from becoming publishing 'dead ends,'" says Raza. "Donnelley Jade lets users bring documents back to the desktop for multipurpose use."
 
Infosis
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Product: Infosis Jade
Developed by BCL Technologies for The Infosis Corporation, a leader in merging the wealth of the web with the power of print.
The Company
Based both in Boston and the United Kingdom, The Infosis Corp. provides a range of electronic parallel publishing services to the publishing industry. The company's primary focus is in services that leverage the content and brand identity of existing print products, providing its clients a fast, cost-effective way to establish web presence and generate new revenue. While Infosis' products maintain the look-and-feel of the original publication, they also add web-based interactivity, adding value and enhancing the user-experience. Infosis' mission is to provide a cost-effective way for publishers, retailers and catalog companies to convert and deliver content electronically and make it profitable.
The Challenge
A core part of the Infosis solution is the extraction and re-purposing of content from digital pre-press files, often in PDF format. The high-volume, fast-turnaround production environment at Infosis requires an efficient PDF data-mining tool. Moreover, because of the rich graphical layouts of many print products, Infosis required a cost-effective data extraction tool that would allow them to graphically define regions on the surface of a page, extracting the content just from that region.
BCL's Solution
To help Infosis accomplish this, BCL designed a customized version of its own Jade software. Designed to extract text, tabular data, and graphics from PDF files for editing and manipulation in other applications such as Microsoft® Word®, Excel®, and Adobe® Photoshop®, Jade uses a unique zoning feature to target data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, while also leaving behind superfluous data that would be unnecessarily extracted by a general document conversion program. The application customized for Infosis allows the corporation to use Jade's zoning capabilities to extract each piece of content (including graphics) as an individual graphic and place it into the appropriate directory for datamining purposes. As with Thomson Financial, BCL has continuously worked with key Infosis personnel to improve access to the advertising databases it provides for its clients.

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