The Halifax Herald Limited project
About The Halifax Herald Limited
The Halifax Herald Limited is one of Canada's oldest and largest independent newspapers. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and dating from 1875, the Herald publishes The Chronicle-Herald, The Mail-Star and The Sunday Herald.
The problem
Like all metro daily newspapers, the Herald publishes hundreds of display ads and thousands
of classified ads every day, resulting in thousands of daily invoices and monthly statements.
For years we printed duplicate bills so the Accounting Department would have file copies in the
event an advertiser had questions or required a reprint.
Obviously, a significant amount of time and space was occupied handling these bills -- separating,
filing, finding, re-filing -- all very manual processes. The bills themselves begin as huge ascii
files that are printed on continuous pre-printed forms using IBM 6400 line printers.
In 2000, we developed a PERL-based document management system that indexed the ascii files by
invoice number. This allowed the Accounting Department to search for a particular invoice or
statement and display it on their screen. The system was quite convenient for them but not robust
enough to allow us to stop printing and filing duplicates.
It proved that a document management system would save time, money and storage space, and allow
us to better serve our customers. Managing, protecting, indexing and cross-referencing all these
ascii files was a primary challenge. An Oracle database, fronted by a cgi interface using DBI/DBD
and PERL was the answer.
Why txt2pdf PRO?
The other major concern was the integrity of ascii files -- they're easy to alter. This made PDF
desirable. Customers, auditors and taxmen could agree that PDFs were exact replicas of original bills.
How to convert our ascii files to PDF? A quick search of the web turned up txt2pdfPRO. Right out
of the box it produced perfect PDF versions of our bills. Of course they were still plain text, hard
to read on the screen and painful to print on line printers.
txt2pdfPRO's overlay/underlay capabilities provided a perfect solution -- underlays exactly
replicating our pre-printed forms, color-matched and complete with the Herald logo. Now the PDFs
look just like the bills we print, making them easy to read on the screen and suitable for reprinting
on laser printers.
While evaluating txt2pdfPRO we discovered it also converted all our large reports accurately to PDF.
These reports are hundreds of pages thick and many are just for historical record.
Summary
Benefits derived from this project:
- No longer printing duplicate bills.
- No more manual filing of hard copy bills and reports.
- Invoices & statements available online for review and reprinting. Document database can be searched by invoice number, account number and/or date.
- Significant paper and ribbon savings.
- Large reports are now cataloged and full-text searchable.
Author
This synopsis was compiled by:
Paul Williams
Director of Information Technology
The Halifax Herald Limited
Email: paul@halifaxherald.com
