Competence Center - information, process management
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Competence Center – The PDF Technology

The PDF Technology

icon_bookBelow you find basic papers and useful information about PDF and PDF/A in general and about Soft Xpansion´s PDF technology. Moreover, the page offers details on the DMS and archiving projects Soft Xpansion has conducted.

Centralizing Process Management and Optimizing Digital Archiving: Case Study and Process Example in the Banking Sector

 In various large-scale banks and financial institutions with a wide and global client base, Soft Xpansion has successfully carried out several consecutive projects to centralize the process management including digital archiving procedures. As an example, a case study shows the basic tasks that had to be performed, the structure of the solution (based on EMC Documentum) and how the solution has been put into practice in a bank of the Raiffeisen Bank International AG network. The study also exemplifies the optimization of a specific process within the bank.   

Case Study

Similar projects have been performed for ING Bank (Central & Eastern Europe), BNP Paribas Group (Ukrsibbank Ukraine) and ProCredit Bank Georgia. In all cases, the project teams fully tailored the solutions to the specific client requirements.

More Information on the solutions for digital archiving and process centralization is available on the web pages for Soft Xpansion´s project and services solutions.

General Information on PDF and PDF/A

Click on the links below to download details. The first five links lead you to the web pages of the PDF Association. These pages are run and administered within the sole responsibility of the PDF Association.

 PDF/A in a Nutshell 2.0

PDF/UA in a Nutshell

Technical Note TN0001 – PDF/A-1 and Namespaces 

Technical Note TN0003 – Metadata in PDF/A-1

PDF Software and documentationPDF Format and PDF Basics

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file format for representing documents in a manner independent of the software, hardware and operating system used to create them and of the output device on which they are to be displayed or printed. A PDF document consists of a collection of objects that together describe the appearance of one or more pages, possibly accompanied by additional interactive elements and higher-level application data. A PDF file contains the objects making up a PDF document along with associated structural information, all represented as a single self-contained sequence of bytes.

A document’s pages (and other visual elements) can contain any combination of text, graphics and images. A page’s appearance is described by a PDF content stream, which contains a sequence of graphics objects to be painted on the page. This appearance is fully specified; all layout and formatting decisions have already been made by the application generating the content stream.

In addition to describing the static appearance of pages, a PDF document can contain interactive elements that are possible only in an electronic representation. PDF supports annotations of many kinds for such things as text notes, hypertext links, markup, file attachments, sounds and movies. A document can define its own user interface; keyboard and mouse input can trigger actions that are specified by PDF objects. The document can contain interactive form fields to be filled in by the user, and can export the values of these fields to or import them from other applications.

Finally, a PDF document can contain higher-level information that is useful for exchanging content among applications. In addition to specifying appearance, a document’s content can include identification and logical structure information that allows it to be searched, edited or extracted for reuse elsewhere. PDF is particularly well-suited for representing a document as it moves through the successive stages of a prepress production workflow.

PDF BasicsPDF SDK GuidePerfect PDF User Guide

PDF Creation and Distribution on a Network

Advantages and Capabilities of PDF Forms

PDF Xpansion Technology

Metadata in Microsoft Office and in PDF Documents

Secure PDF Documents Using Digital Signatures (German)

Smart Cards and Their Application in a Two-Factor Authentification (German)