Monday, December 29, 2008

Automate testing and examination of PDF generation

This can also be applied to other formats like DWF (DWFx). Think about the costs if the PDF or DWF is incorrect, missing some important text for example. Say you have automated plotting and even if you make spot checks of the resulting files there is a chance you miss something. We all know that the PDF creation for example is tricky and because of bugs in the software the result might not always be what you expect.

The solution is to create a test automation. Say you produce the files from AutoCAD or Revit. What you could do it to produce two different outputs like plotting to both PDF and to TIFF and then automatically compare the result by first rasterizing the PDF file.

A software that can be automated to compare images is ImageMagick.

Another usage for this is version compare. You can automate a compare of two versions and have that available to the reviewer.

Via Adobe Reader Blog with more to read about this topic.

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