Imaging Experts

Customized Tools That Gain You a Competitive Advantage!

Though many of our customers buy our standard, off-the-shelf RasterMaster tools or FlexSnap universal viewing solutions, a surprising number have special requests. A great motivation for these requests is to embed capabilities within their product that their competitors can’t offer.

Requests come in for configurable viewers that can be easily modified to the needs of a particular client (for example - data entry versus administrator) without requiring the purchase and maintenance of two different applications. Other queries come in for special enhancements that allow our viewers to duplicate an existing viewer in look and feel. This allows an easy replacement of legacy products without requiring re-training the “troops.” Other features, like our FlexSnap virtual document support, came about because a customer wanted to dramatically increase the speed of their insurance claim form processing.

Some of our recent PDF vector display and annotation improvements came about because a customer wanted to reduce the time it took to review blueprints when using their current the paper method. By duplicating the look and feel of their approval and review stamps but enabled online, they could get rid of paper and pencil and all the issues inherent in handling physical media. Dramatic improvements in throughput resulted.

For customers who have even more extreme demands of operating systems or hardware platforms, we have created down-sized or ported versions of our RasterMaster libraries that satisfy their specific market or customers. Sometimes download size is an issue or perhaps it’s a particular platform – for example an AMD 64 bit processor – that helps that customer compete. Our products are designed to be portable and maintainable while maintaining their performance benefits, even when customized. 

We win when you win! Give us a call.

Why Convert Adobe Acrobat PDF to JPEG? Isn’t PDF better?

If PDF is such a portable format, why do many of our customers want to be able to convert PDF to JEPG?

Well, one great reason is that it makes your document much easier to view over the web. Your browser automatically views JPEG images, whereas Adobe acrobat has to be installed.

When offering documents to a large public user base, companies do not want to get involved with supporting many different operating systems and applications. JPEG has been supported within browsers for at least 10 years so it is a very safe bet, unlike any other.

Additionally, viewing JPEG images within a browser doesn’t require the start of a plug-in such as Adobe Acrobat embedded within a browser – saving valuable time for users. As all of us have experienced, even on a fast system, starting up Adobe takes a while, whereas viewing a JPEG is effectively instantaneous.

Imagine the time savings that a company, such as a mortgage or insurance company, would realize in its customer service department if files could be viewed more rapidly. (There are other options as well, such as using a commercial web viewer to view all of your documents through a standard web browser, eliminating the need for the creator application – and in the same environment you can retrieve, view and annotate documents and images).

Also, if you have a multipage PDF file such as an account statement or prospectus, even with Adobe installed, the entire file has to be downloaded before the first page can be viewed. For speed and efficiency, it is often better to split up multi-page PDF documents to single page JPEGs and stream them one at a time to the browser. Your users see their pages much more quickly this way.

The downside of JPEG is that the algorithm was meant to compress continuous tone images such as photos, not documents. Sometimes JPEG stored documents may exhibit artifacts or fuzziness around the text. Depending upon the document, other compression methods may do better than JPEG. As always, consult your imaging experts (Snowbound) for the optimum image conversion or document viewing solution to your requirements.

For additional information about the JPEG image format you can visit http://www.jpeg.org/.