Every week someone speculatively asks me to ‘look at this product’ with a view to integrating into our Document Manager. If we looked at all of them we’d never actually have any time to write the product software, but last week one caught my eye.
It was some PDF compression software from CrispDocuments (http://www.crispdocuments.com/) that claims some amazing size reductions for PDF documents which to be honest I was very sceptical about. So I took 4 sample documents of different types, monochrome text, a mix of mono text and colour titles, a greyscale photo and a mono invoice with a colour logo and compared the files sizes before and after their compression. The results were quite amazing with reductions in size to between 14% and 50% of original with no degradation of quality, and still viewable with standard PDF viewers. As you can imagine the resulting benefits are huge, smaller file sizes mean less storage requirements and faster transmission times which in turn mean faster document loading / viewing times. As a consequence it means Document Imaging can start working with colour documents with the same speed as current monochrome ones, whilst the user gets to see all the additional colour information not normally apparent, like the colour of ink in a signature.
I have seen compression levels like this before but they required specific decoding software drivers, this is a solution compatible with existing viewers. I shall be talking closely with these people about using their technology in our product.
Tim