PDFreactor Case Studies

MAHA Maschinenbau Haldenwang GmbH & Co. KG relies on pimcore and RealObjects PDFreactor for automated price list generation

As a world market leader in the areas of motor vehicle testing and workshop equipment, MAHA is constantly striving to secure and further expand its position. Safety is the central topic at MAHA. To meet their own demands, they focus on digitalization, networking and new ways of thinking about safety. Subsidiaries and trading partners in over 150 countries enable optimal all-round advice and supply directly on site. Through individual support, customer requirements can be met with customized solutions and investment security.

When searching for a suitable print solution that easily supports common web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), the choice quickly fell on PDFreactor from RealObjects. In addition to the aggregation possibilities offered by pimcore, the use of PDFreactor means that there are no restrictions on design implementation, despite the use of flexbox elements and dynamic tables of contents, for example.

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RealObjects PDFreactor aids the digitalisation of administration within the cosinex procurement management system

As a pioneer in the field of electronic procurement (e-procurement), since 2000 cosinex GmbH has been providing the public sector with solutions to electronically support public procurement and tendering.

The cosinex procurement management system enables the procurement process to be handled electronically, from needs assessment and designing the tender procedure through to administering contracts concluded on the basis of electronic files. The cosinex procurement marketplace supports electronic transactions and communications between public-sector clients and providers as part of awarding public contracts.

The market for solutions to meet these requirements quickly proved straightforward. Ultimately, only two specific providers made the cut for consideration. Our hugely important licensing requirements in particular prompted us to opt for PDFreactor by RealObjects, rather than its Australian competitor, in the spring of 2021.

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Dell Technologies Implements RealObjects’ PDFreactor for Strategic Application

Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the data era.

Dell Technologies provides the IT industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the data era. That includes next-generation IT software, such as CloudIQ, a web-based AIOps application that IT teams use to proactively monitor and predictively analyze the health and cybersecurity of their Dell server, storage, data protection, networking and hyperconverged infrastructure systems.

A worldwide community of Dell software engineers and related infrastructure specialists are churning out new CloudIQ features weekly, instantly delivering them to users’ web browsers. When Dell needed a way for users to export CloudIQ data, the company turned to RealObjects’ PDFreactor.

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Long-standing OEM partnership between RealObjects and K15t – PDFreactor® leverages Scroll PDF Exporter and enables professionally styled PDF exports directly from Atlassian Confluence

K15t is a software company based in Stuttgart Germany, that specializes in developing solutions for Atlassian products, such as Jira and Confluence. As an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner, K15t offers a range of apps and integrations that enhance the functionality of these tools. K15t helps teams to unleash the potential of their products and creates solutions to help them better educate and enable their customers. The Scroll Apps for Confluence help teams modernize how they author and manage content and documentation, while Backbone Issue Sync for Jira enables project collaboration across departmental and B2B boundaries. In addition, Orderly Databases for Confluence Cloud supports keeping content structured and consistent across Confluence.

Scroll PDF Exporter is one of the range of Scroll apps that are available for the popular content management system, Atlassian Confluence. The app allows users to easily export Confluence content as PDF documents, providing full control over the styling and format of the generated export.

The key benefits of using the PDFreactor® library lie within its ability to accurately render complex layouts and designs, providing extensive customization options and offering a range of advanced options for scalability, export stability and security. Subsequently, export templates created in Scroll PDF Exporter can be applied to Confluence content ensuring that users have full control over the appearance of the PDF output. Overall, the combination of Scroll PDF Exporter and RealObjects PDFreactor® makes it easy for Atlassian Confluence users to export their pages as professionally styled PDF documents. Together they form a powerful and reliable tool for anyone looking to create high-quality PDFs from Atlassian Confluence.

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Case Study: The use of RealObjects PDFreactor® to create management reports, from a self-developed reporting application to Integrated Data Warehouse (in German: Integrierter Datenhaushalt – IDH) for the Sparkasse Financial Group

Finanz Informatik, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, is the central IT service provider of Sparkasse Finance Group. Its customers include 376 Sparkasse savings banks, six state banks, DekaBank, eight state Landesbausparkasse state building societies, public sector insurers and further companies within the Sparkasse Finance Group and the financial sector. Finanz Informatik offers a complete IT service – from application development through infrastructure and data center operations to consultancy, training and support.

The reporting application ‘IDH-Reporting’ for integrated data warehousing (IDH) provides the savings banks and state banks in Germany with a comprehensive software solution in the form of an individual development for the creation of reports and analyses from its IDH databases. Self- development means that IDH-Reporting is designed precisely for the specific needs of the savings banks and state banks, providing a wide functional range and great flexibility and avoiding the overheads of standard market tools with the irrelevant functions they include.

In the age of digitalization and the paperless office there remains the regulatory obligation to permanently archive certain results in order to track decisions and to visualize and in some cases also print content for the management and for committees. This not only requires the creation of reports in PDF format but also the possibility of exporting and importing report contents to and from PowerPoint using the Finanz Informatik committee reporting plugin. The documents that are created must be of high quality and optically attractive in order to satisfy the exacting standards of the management and the committees.

A further challenge is the permanent archiving of IDH retrievals and annotated analysis results. Persisted PDF documentation is required here also in order to fulfil the regulatory requirements in relation to assurance and traceability. These are generally results in table form that can often be large.

Various possible solutions were investigated for the creation of PDF documents in order to satisfy the tasks in the above challenge. Taking into account the regulatory requirements in relation to archiving in PDF/A format RealObjects PDFreactor® proved to be the most suitable tool. PDFreactor® distinguished itself with 1:1 reproduction of the browser UI in the PDF, even with more complex HTML content. Server-side printing without dedicated UI software such as a headless browser means that PDFreactor® is excellent for use in server landscapes that are highly optimized with high level protective measures.

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Case Study: The Use of RealObjects PDFreactor® to meet statutory Archiving Obligations (PDF/A) at the Internet Branch of the Sparkasse Savings Banks

Finanz Informatik, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, is the central IT service provider of Sparkasse Finance Group. Its customers include 384 Sparkasse savings banks, six state banks, DekaBank, eight state Landesbausparkasse state building societies, public sector insurers and further companies within the Sparkasse Finance Group. Finanz Informatik offers a complete IT service – from application development through infrastructure and data centre operations to consultancy, training and support. In OSPLus the company is now providing one of the leading overall banking systems for the German market.

According to Directive 2004/39/EC of 21.04.2004, released by the European Parliament and the Council regarding markets for financial instruments (MiFID, abbreviation for Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) banks are obliged to archive advertising content presented to their customers for certain types of products for a period of five years and to submit this in the event of legal disputes. This also applies to advertising information shown online via the Internet branches of the Sparkasse savings banks. Realization of archiving that conforms to the directive (conforming to PDF/A) presents substantial challenges to Finanz Informatik as the operator of the Internet branch.

The use of RealObjects PDFreactor allowed an approach to be realized for the Internet branch that guaranteed the fulfillment of statutory archiving requirements (PDF/A compliant) that saved a lot of expenditure compared to the alternative approaches that were investigated and that would not have been easily realizable with other PDF libraries. Finanz Informatik chose a PDFreactor Corporate Application License because the Internet branch is operated using a group concept (50+ groups, 400+ physical and/or virtual servers) and this also covers the future expansion of the server infrastructure.

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Alterra PIM-System and RealObjects PDFreactor® for Market Grounds: high-quality product catalogs “on demand”

Sepia based in Düsseldorf, Germany, is one of the leading manufacturers of Product Information Management Software. Alterra® is the best system for fast and sustainable integration of a professional product marketing solution in large companies. Sepia’s far-reaching services are: determination of the requirements and integration of a PIM system including the complete rollout of the software. As result you can manage complex product data and publish it into different systems and formats.

The Hamburg-based company Market Grounds develops and markets high-quality food products related to coffee. In order to keep customers up to date with the current range of products, Market Grounds must be able to create product information and price lists with focus on their different target groups. In the past, Market Grounds maintained various data repositories for this purpose, each of which was specifically specialized for its output medium. To reduce production times for the different output channels and to get the effort required for data maintenance under control, the company decided to integrate Alterra PIM as a central product data store for all marketing and sales-relevant product information (texts, product features, image data, videos and much more).

Alterra PIM combined with RealObjects PDFreactor opens up new ways to build an uncomplicated, lean and fast print automation system – 100% supporting a modern digital strategy. Alterra PIM improves your product data and target channel accuracy; RealObjects PDFreactor is the professional tool for the best possible PDF output. With this state-of-the-art solution, which is quickly implemented and easy to use, your company will reach another milestone on the road to digitalization.

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Accessibility Foundation uses PDFreactor for accessible reporting

The Accessibility Foundation is the knowledge center on digital accessibility in the Netherlands. In Europe, they are an important provider of expertise in the digital accessibility domain and active in many European and local projects. They research, test and develop accessibility solutions. Accessibility Foundation provides support, consultancy and accessibility audit services for websites and apps.

The Accessibility Foundation supports their customers to make their websites and apps accessible. This is done by performing accessibility audits on websites or mobile apps. The resulting reports are presented in an accessible PDF document. By integrating PDFreactor they have an automated workflow to generate well-formed accessible PDF/UA documents from their own datasets. Because the input is clean HTML, it is easy to add additional documents without having to change the way the PDF generation is carried out.

PDFreactor was the only tool Accessibility Foundation could find that was able to reliably and consistently convert HTML documents into accessible and well-formed PDF/UA documents. Using the online documentation and RealObjects’ helpful support people, it was quite easy to set up a working document. And because the command-line tool has lots of features, it wasn’t even needed to write any code for the conversion process.

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Raiffeisen Austria is counting on PDF Generation with RealObjects PDFreactor in its E-banking Solution

Raiffeisen Software GmbH is the software house of Raiffeisen Bankengruppe Österreich and one of the largest IT service providers in the country. For over 50 years Raiffeisen Software GmbH has been creating IT solutions that provide innovation, increased efficiency and added value to customers. Raiffeisen Software GmbH supports the daily business of Raiffeisenbanks in Austria with user-friendly IT systems. The corresponding IT solutions set standards in the financial sector.

Personal electronic document storage is an important topic for the customers of various Raiffeisen systems. In the e-banking system „Mein ELBA“ Raiffeisen therefore aims to offer its customers the simple and fast generation of PDFs in various templates (turnover lists, advisor mailbox etc.). The interconnection within all templates in the system means that it is also important that separate implementation and layout of the PDF document is not necessary beyond the web templates, which have also be designed both professionally and responsively. Ideally the PDF should be generated from the HTML and CSS shown in the web browser.

The use of RealObjects PDFreactor allowed Raiffeisen to establish a generically usable „HTML to PDF as a service“ function in its systems without requiring a lot of time. Raiffeisen Software GmbH chose a PDFreactor „Corporate Application License“ that also enables unlimited use of any sub applications such as „Mein ELBA“ (https://banking.raiffeisen.at/) as part of the application „Digitale Regionalbank“.

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EDGE Learning Media integrates PDFreactor into Content Management System

EDGE Learning Media is a leading provider of learning material. They believe in creating effective and efficient content, and enriching learning experiences. EDGE Learning Media has a national footprint, which is testament to the hard work done to establish meaningful relationships in education and industry. It is also testament to EDGE’s reputation for developing clients’ enriched learning experiences on time and to budget.

In order to streamline its process and ensure that the same quality content available in its books is provided through a variety of online channels, EDGE embarked on a project to digitize all its content. From textbooks to concept videos to multiple choice questions to case studies, all content was moved from a variety of formats and software packages into a centralized Content Management System.

After significant research, PDFreactor was selected to provide the backbone for this extraction process, thanks to its proven reliability and accuracy in rendering a variety of content. Integrating PDFreactor into the CMS and publishing process has enabled EDGE Learning Media to produce high quality print ready PDFs. Incorporating all the complexity of publishing textbooks, from images and graphs to complex accounting tables has been achieved under the watchful and detailed eye of experienced typesetters.

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AdvancED® integrates PDFreactor into eProve™ School Improvement Platform

AdvancED is the largest community of education professionals in the world. They are a non-profit, non-partisan organization that conducts rigorous, on-site external reviews of Pre-K-12 schools and school systems to ensure that all learners realize their full potential.

Most recently, AdvancED introduced the next generation school improvement platform – eProve™. The eProve platform is comprised of several applications that use common platform RESTful APIs and services for various functional areas, PDF generation being one of these common services used by each application for its PDF reporting needs.

One of the key features of the eProve product offering is the ability to generate rich and visually appealing PDF reports. Previously, the PDF generation layer used iText, a popular Java PDF library, for programmatic construction of PDF documents. One of the drawbacks of this library had been the inability to customize and enrich PDF output without having to write custom Java code for each customization, which has proven effort and resource intensive.

A new, flexible and feature-rich PDF solution was needed, and after careful analysis and testing of several leading products, the decision was made to use PDFreactor, the market-leading product featuring advanced customization and cutting-edge visual design capabilities. PDFreactor has allowed AdvancED to take its PDF reports, a critical customer-facing feature, to the next level of freedom with modern visual design and flexibility.

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ReviewPro integrates PDFreactor® for Client Reporting

ReviewPro is the leading provider of Guest Intelligence solutions to independent hotel brands worldwide. Their suite of cloud-based solutions includes Online Reputation Management (ORM) and the Guest Survey Solution (GSS), which enable clients to obtain a deeper understanding of reputation performance as well as operational/service strengths and weaknesses. More than 25,000 hotel brands worldwide are currently using ReviewPro’s solutions.

At ReviewPro they provide their clients with the most relevant and insightful information delivered in the most actionable way possible. Downloadable reports, in both excel and PDF, are a vital component in how their clients manage their guest satisfaction, teams, tasks, day-to-day activities, and organizational and management meetings.

A static reporting solution was not an option for ReviewPro, and their challenge was to provide a dynamic reporting solution across their platform that would give their clients the customized information they needed, in the simplest and most efficient way possible. It had to be a scalable solution that they could implement across both existing and new functionality.

After comparing various options, their engineering and product teams selected PDFreactor as the product most suited to their use case. PDFreactor allows their clients to get real-time reports that are completely customizable to their role and informational needs. When their users are in the ReviewPro tool they are able to customize their view of the information on screen, and PDFreactor allows them to then immediately translate this into a printable and sharable PDF report.

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Mindworking has chosen PDFreactor®

The Danish software company – Mindworking A/S – has successfully integrated PDFreactor into their marketing system. The new PDF engine enables accurate correspondence between the HTML editor in the system and the output PDF files, which has improved satisfaction among their most important clients.

Mindworking A/S has developed marketing systems for the real estate industry since 2002, and now operates throughout Scandinavia and the UK. The recent penetration of new markets has resulted in new demands in terms of production of marketing material.

Mindworking has been challenged by the requests for flexible text columns. The initial PDF engine did not support for HTML5 regions, and Mindworking had to find an alternative solution.

Based on a market research Mindworking chose to go with RealObjects and PDFreactor which seems to be the right choice. Today PDFreactor is successfully implemented into the Mindworking Marketing System, and Mindworking is now happy to accommodate all sorts of layout requests from the real estate industry in different markets.

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Thomas International integrates RealObjects PDFreactor®

Thomas International provides people assessments which empower business leaders to transform the performance of their teams and individuals – and deliver an immediate impact on their organization.

Thomas products include many different types of custom reports which are dynamically generated from a large bank of text-based content and driven by personalized assessment data. These also include many specialized data visualizations. Reports are requested in real time by globally dispersed online end users, so they need to be generated and delivered speedily.

The existing report creation technology was old, inflexible and reports were very basic because more complex layouts were impossible to create. We needed a faster, more flexible and modern way to create reports. We also needed to support most global languages including RTL (right-to-left) languages. Data visualizations were also simplistic because it was not possible to exploit better technologies. One of the few good things about our old technology was that it is based on a low level PDF API so would render documents quickly.

They built a new highly object oriented .NET based reporting engine that dynamically constructs and outputs the HTML5/CSS3 based documents and injects the SVG/JavaScript visualizations where required. Thomas needed a third party product to convert these to PDF. They evaluated several vendor offerings and chose to go with PDFreactor.

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collectionHQ® integrates RealObjects PDFreactor®

collectionHQ is the leading collection performance improvement solution, based on the proven Evidence Based Stock Management (EBSM™) methodology. Easy to implement, simple to use and extremely costeffective, collectionHQ delivers repeatable performance improvements for library collections by providing evidence based analysis, advice and performance monitoring of all collections across all media. See www.collectionhq.com.

Many subscribers to collectionHQ have a requirement to take outputs from the action plans around the shelf stacks as they perform activities to improve their collections. Using the previous version of collectionHQ, users would often choose to export data to a spreadsheet where they would reformat the output before printing material to use at the shelves. By incorporating PDFreactor, collectionHQ was able to provide users the ability to reformat data on screen then deliver straight to PDF. This has provided a significant improvement for many library staff.

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RealObjects PDFreactor in use at the Deutsche Bundesbank

The Deutsche Bundesbank provides users with PDF versions of their website content, generated on the server at the click of a mouse using PDFreactor®, which was integrated on the Bundesbank’s website by the internet agency ]init[.

As the central bank of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Deutsche Bundesbank maintains one main website – www.bundesbank.de – as well as various subsites with extensive content. In order to offer its users additional service alongside the HTML print version the Bundesbank decided at the end of last year to integrate a PDF generator functionality on its websites.

By clicking on a corresponding PDF icon, users can prompt the server to convert texts published on the website into a printable PDF for download. In order to obtain an attractive and clear design, the existing print view can be used as layout. Integrating a PDF generator on the Bundesbank’s website, the primary requirement was for the PDF document to include the Bundesbank logo and the text content area of the web pages, further adding page numbers.

The Bundesbank’s objective was to implement an efficient, secure and functional product that met its requirements without requiring complex adjustments.

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The Canadian Paediatric Society integrates PDFreactor

The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) is the national association of paediatricians, committed to working together to advance the health of children and youth by nurturing excellence in health care, advocacy, education, research and support of its membership. As a voluntary professional association, the CPS represents more than 3,000 Canadian paediatricians, paediatric subspecialists, paediatric residents, and other people who work with and care for children and youth.

The CPS publishes practice points and position statements in abstract format in their medical journal Paediatrics & Child Health and in full-length HTML at their website. A printable, professionally-designed PDF is then created from the HTML in real time from a server using PDFreactor®.

The CPS utilizes PDFreactor® to capitalize on their existing web processes by defining page layout and styles using CSS. PDFreactor® delivers fast, reliable, high-quality journal-like documents that their audiences can easily download and print.

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Deutsche Post World Net integrates RealObjects PDFreactor in Intranet application PDF Basket

Deutsche Post World Net is a leading provider of both Dialog Marketing and efficient outsourcing and system solutions for the mail business. In 2006 the group’s turnover reached more than 45 billion Euro. Deutsche Post World Net employs over 500,000 staff in more than 220 countries and territories, making it the second largest employer in the world.

They used PDFreactor to implement the application “PDF Basket”. Similarly to a shopping basket, staff can now collect the content of any Intranet pages they want at a click of their mouse and then after a final check print them or send them as one continuous document.

Read this case study also to learn why the styling-based processing model of CSS is superior over the transformation-based processing model of XSL, for the majority of documents printed or streamed over the Web.

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Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder integrates RealObjects PDFreactor into online tariff calculator

The Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder (VBL) has been providing public-sector occupational pensions for 80 years. Currently some 5,450 participating employers and about 4.1 million insured employees use VBL’s services. VBL manages more than € 14 billion of employee and employer contributions. The instant provision of printable insurance offers (PDF) is a major feature of VBL’s Web offerings.

RealObjects PDFreactor enables a fast, realiable, cost-efficient and high-quality printing functionality within the VBL offer creation process.

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SoftGuide uses RealObjects PDFreactor for the automated production of software exposés

Since 1996 SoftGuide has been providing online information about software solutions in the area of industry solutions, business applications areas and standard software. The SoftGuide database currently contains more than 8,000 up to date program descriptions plus company profiles of more than 5,100 suppliers, producers and service providers. In 2006 more than 6.4 million visitors visited the SoftGuide portal to research commercial software solutions.

SoftGuide uses RealObjects PDFreactor for the automated production of software exposés, which visitors can print out or download. PDFreactor converts pre-generated HTML files into software exposés in PDF format – of excellent quality even when the HTML files contain problematical code.

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