Listen to this articleActivePDF provides PDF automation tools for developers and enterprise integrations. The PDF specification is extremely complex and their products eliminate the need to understand how a PDF is constructed in a reliable, performant manner.
Below is our interview with Tim Sullivan, CEO at ActivePDF:
Q: You’ve recently announced major release of DocGenius™ Toolkit and Toolkit Expansion Pack; could you tell us something more?
A: Absolutely, thank you for asking. The two major enhancements to Toolkit are the bookmark manager and append mode. The bookmark manager gives you total control over the creation of the outline “tree” that is displayed in your PDF reader, including look and feel and what happens when you click on a bookmark.
Append mode is extremely exciting because we now have the first PDF developer tool that supports the concept of PDF versioning. Before this release, every PDF created by Toolkit was “new” and it was impossible to roll back to a previous version. Now, with append mode, you can even review version by version changes in PDF readers that support that functionality.
The Toolkit Expansion Pack brings PDF rendering and content extraction to the table. It’s now possible to not only build applications that create and manipulate PDF, but also present mission-critical content to the user in multiple mediums, while providing search-and-extract functionalities for smart decision-making.
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Q: We live in an era of small devices and big data; is that a good thing or a bad thing from your point of view?
A: I believe that it’s a mixture of both – small devices provide access to anything at any time by anyone; but the compact presentation format presents challenges to effectively communicate content the same way a traditional computer monitor can.
With big data, we can now make intelligent decisions based upon previously unavailable or hidden, “dark” content. However, the data may be misconstrued and misused if not taken within the correct context. One can quickly become lost in a sea of data, losing perspective of what is truly valuable.
Q: Please tell us a little about the technology that drives your platform?
A: PDF is unique among digital documents – it’s presentation to the world is “flat” like a book, but under the hood, there is a lot of power. We can define form fields, embed smart metadata, deploy rich content and securely deliver and share content.
While many tout HTML5 as the ultimate delivery technology for the internet, rarely is it self-contained, requiring outside resources. With PDF, everything we need to accurately reproduce the content can be in one single file. Also, having PDF as an ISO standard is a huge plus. PDF is here to stay!
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Over the last year, we’ve made a huge internal push to rewrite much of our infrastructure code so that it is more extensible and modular. Instead of relying on Microsoft-only networking technologies, we now support industry standards for communication in much of our product line – all as part of a long-term strategy to move the technology into the cloud.
We are unique in our space because ActivePDF has literally everything you can do with traditional desktop applications, but comes in a scalable and customizable package for workflow automation. A move into the cloud is the next logical step.
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