Paperless

The large folios of photocopied documentation would be replaced by epub files for viewing on tablet devices.

Paperless

Tue 9 August 2011
Settings

Settings

Configure templates and create data snapshots

Select processing period

Select processing period

Choose a time frame to work with

Download

Download

Import data and documents from the web application

Edit

Edit

Reposition, add and edit agenda items and documents

Generate

Generate

Build and distribute epub files

When the Paykel Trust repository was in place, thought was given to further streamlining the process. The Trust Board’s Director, Dr Jim Hodge, proposed that the very large folios of photocopied documentation for each funding round be replaced by epub files which board and committee members could view on tablet devices.

Effective conversion of all the file types in use required desktop processing. The solution is a native Windows application, tightly coupled to the existing web repository.

Conversion

PDF files proved the most difficult format to convert; tabular content in particular. We overcame this by providing the ability to recapture PDF documents as images where the conversion to text was inadequate.

Integration

The software uses a RESTful service to authenticate users with their existing web application credentials. Once logged in, data is retrieved from and written to the web using the same service.

Issue resolution

With a couple of mouse clicks the desktop application can generate a zip of the current log file and a dump of processing data, allowing any issues that arise to be resolved straightforwardly.

With thanks to …

The software relies heavily on external applications: Microsoft Office DLLs, Calibre and PDFToImage for document conversion; HTMLTidy to keep formatting consistent; Nvu for HTML viewing and editing. It uses SQLite, both for data storage and for logging. On reflection perhaps I shouldn’t claim to have written the software at all: most of the functionality that matters comes from others.