Answering ‘when can we attend events again’, we executed our 6th edition of (in-person) PDF Camp in Berlin. If you’re unaware of what PDF Camp is, let me tell you that it is our annual event where we get our users under the same roof and offer a direct contact between them and a large portion of our team including developers and product managers. The purpose is to learn what users miss and educate on what is not obvious.
Day 1 of this year’s camp kicked off with onboarding, coffees and teas followed by three short educational technical sessions from callas and FourPees staff. These sessions mostly (but not only) revolved around …..drum roll…. JavaScript. No surprises right? And why would you be, scripting in pdfToolbox makes preflighting dynamic and more powerful indeed. After a brief introduction on JavaScript, the sessions dove straight into real world use cases taken from support cases, for example, placing matrix code on a page and how these can be adapted to users’ individual requirements.
The next session in the form of brainstorming set the stage to discuss ideas where attendees focused on the challenges that they face frequently in their workflows. Some of the topics that ended up on the board and discussed over the period of the next day and a half were:
- Performance improvements for a concrete Process Plan in a user workflow that processes almost 100.000 documents per hour with 40 documents in parallel
- Reporting corrupt PDF files
- Creating CIP3 report to control output
- Create better custom HTML and PDF reports
- Possible use of other scripting languages in pdfToolbox
In the group where optimization of HTML reports was being discussed, a couple of possible solutions were evaluated, one being for example, the creation of HTML reports with Java Script and XSLT. Another solution that was tried was the conjunction of JSON reports and "Create file from template" app in Enfocus Switch. The advantage of both variants came out to be that the same visual appearance of PDF and HTML reports was guaranteed.
Our long time partner, Damiano Viscardi from trimbox.it described his PDF Camp experience like this:
