PRODOK Engineering - PDF forms and web site consulting, development and design

Hierarchical selection popup menu

Max Wyss — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:28:57 +0100

A hierarchical popup menu to select a version of a product in the IRS Tax Products Historical DVD.

IRS Tax Products CD-ROM 2006 Final Version is out

Max Wyss — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:43:00 +0100

The 2006 issue of the award winning (thanks to PDFfolio) IRS Tax Products CD-ROM is now out. It can be ordered from NITS, and is shipped worldwide.

As in the earlier versions, the navigation and product finding system is using PDFfolio, as it has been reported in this case study.

The 2006 issue comes with an additional goodie, showing the scalability of PDFfolio. The package contains also the IRS Tax Products Historical DVD, which essentially which essentially has all the tax forms published by the IRS since 1913, and all IRS publications since 1994.

Now with subscription to RSS feeds

Max Wyss — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:08:11 +0100

As you might have already noticed, it is now possible to subscribe to an RSS feed for new items on this site. We have chosen Feedburner to provide feeds for Newsreaders.

Click on the Subscribe (RSS) link in the navigation panel, and you will get to the Feedburner page where you can subscribe.

One-Liner of the week: Randomly random

Max Wyss — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:33:56 +0100

Quite regularly, there is a question on the mailing lists about random numbers, mainly for a unique identifier for a document.

Such random numbers are indeed not a big problem to implement, because JavaScript has the Math Object (because it is part of the Core, it is not described in the Acrobat JavaScript documentation), which contains the Math.random() method.

One-liner of the Week: Simple Time Calculation

Max Wyss — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 16:42:38 +0100

Resently a member of the PlanetPDF forum asked about a way to calculate the time difference between two times indicated in a drop down menu. The times in the drop down menu represent quarter hours (0:00, 0:15, 0:30, 0:45, 1:00, etc.).

(Acrobat) JavaScript provides some extensive time (and date) related functionality in the Date object of the Core. However, using this object is sometimes a bit awkward, and requires some scripting: First, the time strings must be converted to a valid date object. Then, the subtraction is executed. And finally, the result is converted to the desired output string.

FCW: PDF among the top six technologies that reshaped the government

Max Wyss — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:19:05 +0100

Federal Computer Week, a leading US publication for IT in government, they have a list of the top Six technologies that reshaped government. This list consists of:

x86 architecture
Microsoft Windows
Ethernet
Internet
e-Mail messaging
PDF

While particularly item 2 may sound a little bit like unintentional humour, it is not really a surprise that half of the technologies are directly communication related. The interesting point, however, is that PDF has been taken into this list.

Happy New Year

Max Wyss — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:17:29 +0100

We from PRODOK Engineering wish you all a happy and successful 2007.

We are looking forward to a year with interesting and exciting new products and projects.

See you in St.Louis

Max Wyss — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 12:39:26 +0200

It has now been confirmed that Max Wyss will present two educational sessions at the BFMA Symposium 2007, taking place in the Hilton St.Louis at the Ball Park in St.Louis, MO, May 6 to 10, 2007.

There will be two sessions:

Acroforms to XFA: A Siren’s Song or A Must-Do?

and,

Comment watashi-wa make mio Formular multilingual? - or - One Language is Not Enough

The preliminary program for the Symposium and a preregistration form can be downloaded as a fillable PDF from here.

Acrobat 8 and our developments

Max Wyss — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 09:22:43 +0200

A few days ago, Adobe announced Acrobat 8 (and Reader 8).

As soon as we have more information, we will evaluate this version, and we will let our customers know about possible issues concerning our developments. We will also evaluate possible issues for PDFfolio.

Why "Optimizing for Fast Web View" is not optimal for PDF forms

Max Wyss — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 01:12:46 +0200

It has been one of the “little secrets” of Acrobat since version 4, that loading a fillable form under the browser can take quite a long time, or that all of a sudden the form does not react for some time.