Product: pdfHarmony
Based in Westchester County, New York, The Blue Book Building and Construction Network has been the construction industry’s premier information source since 1913, producing regional construction directories in most major markets throughout the United States.
Today, thebluebook.com provides easy access to continually updated information via BB-Bid, their online bid management system with private secure online plan rooms as well as integrated takeoff and markup tools.
BB-Bid users upload up to 10,000 documents daily onto The Blue Book’s servers for processing and distribution. Each night, The Blue Book’s servers run a variety of processes to prepare these files for the next days’ work, including loading metadata and OCR processing for scanned documents.
Unsurprisingly, a small but nonetheless significant proportion of the documents users upload are corrupt or otherwise damaged. These bad files, few as they are, mean trouble because they often cause other downstream processes to fail, in turn stalling the entire overnight process.
“We were hoping that pdfHarmony would reduce the number of problem files, and we were right,” says Ken Keeler, a programmer for The Blue Book. Keeler’s group put pdfHarmony to work right away in pre-processing end-user files to reduce exceptions in the nightly runs. “pdfHarmony proved itself on the very first night,” says Keeler. “We just set up a simple watched folder and run all the files through pdfHarmony first,” he says. “The number of exceptions has dropped substantially,” Keeler states.
The Blue Book is considering other uses for pdfHarmony to further improve their workflows.
The software includes the ability to report error messages as would be encountered by a user with Adobe Acrobat or Reader. pdfHarmony can process each file as it is submitted, with the logging output used to report any errors back to the user. In this way, The Blue Book can help users be sure they are uploading files that are error-free, removing a major headache from The Blue Book’s daily work.
“pdfHarmony started saving us time and money on the first day,” says Keeler. “Now we’re looking to use pdfHarmony to improve user experience and reliability in each aspect of our bid room operations,” he concludes.
About The Blue Book
Since 1913, The Blue Book of Building and Construction Network has been the construction industry’s premier information source. The Blue Book, headquartered in Westchester County, New York, publishes regional construction directories in most major markets throughout the United States. Online, thebluebook.com provides easy access to continually updated information for each of The Blue Book’s regional editions. Construction buyers and sellers also have free access to BB-Bid, The Blue Book’s online bid management system, complete with a private secure online plan room and integrated takeoff and markup tools. For more information, visit www.thebluebook.com.
About pdfHarmony
Designed for high-volume processing, pdfHarmony solves the growing problem of variable-quality PDF files. pdfHarmony ensures that critical document streams and collections meet operational, legal, fiduciary or other requirements. Electronic documents and systems normalized by pdfHarmony suffer the minimum possible disruption due to damaged, corrupt or malformed PDF files.
pdfHarmony’s capabilities include:
- Logs PDF files that are corrupt or damaged and cannot be recovered by Adobe Reader
- Logs any PDF page display or rendering error that Adobe Reader would encounter
- Repairs and saves PDFs as if Adobe Acrobat
- Consolidates identical fonts, font-subsets and XObjects to safely reduce file-size without altering objects on the page
- Harmonizes and converts input PDFs from any creation software into authentic Adobe PDFs
- Programmatically sets PDF file metadata
Learn more about pdfHarmony!