Chris, Acrobat is very good. In addition to virtues already mentioned by others you can electronically "sign" PDF documents.
Acrobat also has a Paper Capture function which runs an OCR on scanned text, converting it back into text which you can cut'n'paste back to other documents in Word etc. The OCR works well but the documents must be scanned at a certain DPI. It also requires you proof read documents carefully, even if you paste the text back into an application where you can use spell check. I once sent a scanned report out which I'd OCR'd so I could reformat in a document and spell checked it but where the word "burn" was now "bum" - and of course spell check don't catch those!! There are also plenty of bureaus who will do bulk scanning of any documents from A5 to A0 size. Some also offer cataloguing services. In the UK I have got work done at about £0.05 per A4 sheet for bulk scanning on an auto feed scanner, rising to £1.50 for A0 drawings done on a flatbed. Doing the scanning yourself is tedious unless you can buy a commercial type scanner (See Canon/Agfa etc. websites). Office/Home user type scanners are pretty slow and only go to A4 size documents. Chris -----Original Message----- From: Chris Maxwell [mailto:chris.maxw...@gnnettest.com] Sent: 16 February 2001 16:58 To: 'EMC-PSTC Internet Forum' Subject: Compliance Documentation Hi all, I do have a question, but the setup is sort of fun, so here goes: Well, I'm at that point. A few years ago, when the EMC Directive was first effective, we had a couple of products that we put through testing. We started keeping "Compliance Folders" which consisted of a cover report generated with MS Word combined with our in-house test reports and third party test reports held together with a big rubber band. This was fun for a couple of products. It was also fun when our company could remember what we called ourselves and what our product names/models were. Well, business is good...too good. The corporate captains have been buying other companies, OEMing products from other people, OEMing products to other people, changing the corporate name, changing the corporate logo, changing product model numbers ... (buying 25,000 coffee stirrers with our logo on them, we used about 20 before they changed the logo. Anybody what a now obsolete GN Nettest coffee stirrer?) Now I have about 20 large folders with anywhere from 100 to 600 pages each. Every time we go through these excercises, I spend hours sniffing toner at the copier (may explain some of my personality) putting different headers and revision numbers on these documents. I then go through 1000's of sheets of paper to run off copies for our representatives and then 100's of dollars in shipping costs to get these 10 pound paper packages to the four corners of the Earth. This is on top of the revisions that we normally incorporate for product re-tests, re-designs ... My question is, is there a better way? I have considered buying Adobe Acrobat and then converting all of my Word Documents to Adobe documents. Then I could scan in the attachments. All of this digital information, I could then store on a CD ROM drive with a main directory for my cover report and sub-directories for all of the various 3rd party reports, CDRH filings ... We could then offer our Compliance information via pdf files on the web. Is anyone doing this? Do you have any recommendations for what software to use? What scanners work best? What scanner resolution will duplicate test reports without losing precious information? Better yet. Does anybody know of a service where you can send 1000's of pages of info to them for them to scan and convert to pdf files. This would prove valuable during the initial conversion. Has anybody tried this and been sorry they did? I'm ready to go digital. My goal is to incorporate word processed reports, third party test lab paper copies, third party test lab pictures, hand written data ... into a coherent package for storage and revision. I assume that many of you fight this same battle. Any hints or pitfall warnings would be greatly appreciated. Chris Maxwell Design Engineer NetTest 6 Rhoads Drive, Building 4 Utica,NY 13502 email: chris.maxw...@gnnettest.com phone: 315-266-5128 fax: 315-797-8024 ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. 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