Checklist “Getting the Most from your Documents”
- Written by Brigit
This checklist helps you think about the situation when you are struggling with the production or publication of documents.
Everyday situations
- Do you feel that Word or Acrobat may sometimes be used inefficiently?
- Are people spending much time fiddling with formatting?
- Are new documents started by taking a copy of an existing one and removing most or all of the content?
- Is there a recurring need to extract content from PDF files?
- Are you satisfied with the way your house style is implemented?
Intelligent documents
- Do you feel that Word could be used for more than creating static text documents?
- Do you have a specific problem that you feel might be solved by document programming?
- adding interactivity to documents?
- automating the creation of documents?
- Are there any constraints that have a bearing on possible solutions?
- Do you have some sort of an idea as to how to solve the problem?
- Would it be useful to dynamically create documents from text held in a database?
- Do you want to include Word-to-PDF conversion as part of an automated process?
- Would it be useful to have Word-to-PDF conversion with features not currently available?
- Do you spend a lot of time adding links and other features to PDFs by hand?
Current resources
- Do you have programmers who could work programmatically with documents?
- PDF (JavaScript, batch sequences, forms, Perl manipulation)
- Word (VBA)
- Perl, other Open Source
- What is their current level of expertise?
- they program documents already
- good programmers, no experience in document programming