Printer Friendly Version

Paper is still the world's most ubiquitous file type, and it's the way every organization did all of its business until just a few years ago. Is it time to get some of those legacy paper documents out of the file cabinets and onto the intranet?

Document conversion (the rather vague term that for our purposes will refer to the process of making digital files from hard copy originals) can be more than a little confusing for those simply interested in making paper documents more widely available. In some cases, a scanner and the time and patience to convert paper documents to electronic files is all you need. For those without that kind of patience (or an intern), document conversion can be outsourced, which is especially useful when moving a massive amount of paper to electronic files.

But deciding who will do the conversion can be the easy part. The more complicated question is deciding what you'd like your paper documents to become. While PDF remains the most popular format for capturing documents designed for paper, larger organizations might find documents that need to be tagged in XML for their document management needs. If your documents are destined for the Web, either on the Internet or an intranet, you might prefer converting documents to HTML.

Five years ago, a conversation on whether to scan documents related to your business into an electronic format would likely be greeted with some skepticism because the technology had its limitations. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is one of the technologies behind scanning documents, and its reliability still isn't 100 percent. But OCR has improved.

"If you go back five years ago, you were able to recognize black and white characters very easily," said Jean-Marc Fontaine, sales and operations manager for I.R.I.S., a Belgian company with offices in Delray Beach, Fla. The technology has matured from there, with gray-scale scanning and techniques for de-speckling backgrounds, for example.

I.R.I.S. makes a number of software packages for document conversion, including business card readers and even a pen-sized scanner that connects directly to your computer via USB. Fontaine said document conversion projects need to have a straight objective. Even larger projects, he said, should try some of the different solutions that are available because most can get the job done with the right high-speed scanner and software. If a company's needs cannot be met by products already on the market, he suggests locating a company to do the work for you.

Despite the alphabet soup of XML, HTML, and SGML that you're likely to encounter when considering document conversion, chances are the best format for your document needs is the well-known and widely used PDF, or Acrobat file, from Adobe.

Fontaine said software and accessories for working with PDFs are a very hot trend. "People keep asking for more," he said.

Among the advantages of PDFs: they are easy to share, they are cross-platform, and they are easily compressed. And, of course, everyone has the Acrobat reader Adobe made available for free.

The Misunderstood PDF

When most people think of a PDF file, they think of easily printable electronic documents. While this is true, Duff Johnson, who as president and founder of Oakland, Calif.-based Document Solutions, Inc. makes a living creating and improving PDF files, said he believes only five percent of the capabilities of Acrobat are actually used.

PDF files can contain navigation aids, such as a table of contents; they can also contain links to Web sites, one feature Johnson said is very underutilized. And while many organizations make forms via PDFs that can be downloaded, filled out, and faxed or mailed in, PDFs actually have form capability. But as with many technologies that have become ubiquitous, users do not have a thorough knowledge of its capability. "It's a source of constant amazement to me," Johnson said.

Another common problem that strikes PDFs is file size. Large PDF files take forever to download, cannot be easily e-mailed, and can actually make finding information (the reason documents are converted in the first place) more difficult.

Johnson's business does a lot of optimizing of PDF files to correct these problems. "The vast majority of PDF files are way too large," Johnson said. A PDF can and should be no larger than an equivalent HTML file with the same images and text.

The needs of electronic documents within organizations differ. Take the example of a marketing department whose sales brochures have been converted to PDF files. They want small file sizes so they can e-mail the brochures to prospective customers. At the same time, the engineering department wants navigation capability (done using the Bookmarks option in Acrobat to make a table of contents) so engineers can find the information they need in large files.