Automated PDF Creation Application

Business Problem - Automate the tedious and time consuming manual process that the graphics team uses to create the same size low resolution PDF's, high resolution PDF's and Page Images from retailer provided PDF files. This is needed to make the automatic data/image/hotspot extraction work in the Ad Extract and other applications.

Solution - Created an application that allows users to work with a batch of PDF files and automatically create desired PDFs and Page Images. Adobe tools such as Acrobat, Distiller and Photoshop were integrated and used extensively to provide this capability.

Features include

• Cropping of PDF files – Based on crop marks within the PDF or specified by the user, the application crops the PDF to eliminate printing related markings.
• Padding and resizing of PDF files – Finds the maximum dimension of a PDF page among the batch of PDF files, then pads and resizes all PDFs accordingly. User can manually specify the desired dimension. padding and resizing creates PDF pages of the same size thus allowing multi-page Flash layout on retailer web sites.
• Creation of low resolution and high resolution PDF files – Reduces the quality of images to create low resolution PDFs that can be used by operations to extract and enter data. Network performance is dramatically improved as the network load is greatly reduced. High resolution files are used later to extract high quality images based on information captured during data extraction process.
• ADD page security code – This allows publishing of listing pages to the production environment in advance of a sale, and prevents consumers from accessing sales ads before their effective dates.
• Creation of page images – From high resolution files, this creates JPG images of pages that are used in retailer sites to display an image of actual newspaper inserts.
• Reports – At the end of the batch process, the application creates a report of processed PDFs and their output files.

Technologies and Tools - DotNet, C#, SQL Server, and Acrobat, Distiller and Photoshop libraries.