Overview

Digital document business is interestingly evolving as companies are forced to re-examine output business processes, exposing inefficiencies from outdated thinking and products. Every organization and every individual realize the high cost of printers, huge volumes of wasted paper and recurring cost of printing ink. Yet we see mounting stacks of wasted paper around every printer in every office. Electronic publishing tools are becoming available to more people than ever before. People can now create digital documents quickly and easily.

People need ways to share information without having to print it on paper. Publishing electronic documents on a network can achieve this objective. However, not all electronic documents can be published easily. Some electronic documents need special software on the client computer to decipher the information stored inside it. Installing necessary software on every client computer becomes economically unviable. However, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software and Web Browser software are freely available. People can easily share information among client computers if the information is in PDF or HTML format. Portable Document Format (PDF) is a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors, and graphics of any source document. The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are platform independent and can be viewed using any Web Browser.

Microsoft Word and Excel are very popular word processing and spreadsheet applications. Sharing information in Word Format (Doc) allows content authoring and editing. Excel Sheets (XLS) are useful while performing mathematical calculations.

The other popular alternative to publishing electronic documents is to E-Mail the information. Even in this case, we must make sure the documents are readable by client computers. You cannot assume that the recipient of an E-Mail will be able to view the attached document. To be sure, we must share information in friendly formats like PDF or HTML. Friendly image formats are JPEG or BMP as they can be viewed from almost every computer today.

Employees in an organization are often blamed for uncontrolled and irresponsible printing. When the truth is - anyone who has ever used a printer has at some point printed irresponsibly! People are often found printing a same document over and over again to get it right. A preview feature provided by software applications eliminates such worries. Unfortunately, preview feature is not found on all applications resulting in people printing and shredding paper! Users will benefit greatly if they could verify their prints before they are actually printed.

The information age has seen an explosion of information. People need intelligent tools to assimilate, represent and share this information and to move one step closer to a paperless world.