SmartLogic Solutions Blog

In the app I had been working on users had to perform a great amount of scanning. In the first few iterations this was done manually, which, of course, lead to lots of user error (namely scanning documents at high resolutions, which clogged the system). It was decided that it was best if our app to control the scan settings for most users. So we found three possible Active X controllers available to allow for this functionality. CianSoft, VintaSoft, and ChestySoft. After a little research we found that VintaSoft didn’t quite meet our needs and that CianSoft’s TwainX controller and ChestySoft’s were eerily similar (it turns out that each company is run by a brother and both products were just different flavors of the same one). In the end ChestySoft was the one we went with because it allows you to perform posts of the scanned data to the server (and the guy that runs the company is super responsive when you have questions).

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So let’s say you have some random PDFs and what you want is one PDF that includes all of the original PDF files and a table of contents listing all of the files and the proper page numbers. Well in Ruby it is not too hard to put this together. There are a wealth of plugins, gems, and other ruby software available for manipulating and creating PDFs (a thorough list can be found here - http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoGeneratePDFs). To get this project up and running we are going to use two PDF::Writer (http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-pdf/) and PDFTK (http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/) - though if you want to get fancier and also include text, html, or xml documents you can use PDF::Htmldoc (http://htmldoc.rubyforge.org/) which requires Htmldoc to be installed. Before I do get started though, I also have give thanks to George Anderson over at Benevolent Code who wrote a lot of similar code on the project which provided me with some great examples.

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