i-Modulas project with txt2pdf

History
i-Modulas Software BV is a young Dutch software developer that brings an established and respected solution for the rental business of construction machines and materials to the internet. The application was originally developed for Unix in the 80-ies under the name “Modulas”. Later, when Windows came up in the business environments, also Windows was supported. When at the beginning of the new century the clash came in the ict industry, the original developer of the application got into problems. An investor bought the application and decided to modernize it and to bring it to the platform of today; the internet!

Concept
In the old days, users bought a license, got a CD and installed the application on their computer. Today the users of i-Modulas rent the usage of the i-Modulas solution per user by the month (the so called ASP concept!). To start i-Modulas, they have to go to www.i-modulas.nl from where they can start the application. They can access i-Modulas from every pc with an internet connection. There are also several pda’s that can be used with i-Modulas, so the information is always at hand, wherever you may be.

Usage of txt2pdf
Most i-Modulas reports are stored in text format in personal user directories from which they can be viewed or printed. With txt2pdf we have added a third option “make a pdf” to this. By pressing a function key the text report is converted to a pdf file and shown in the default pdf-viewer. From there it can be printed, but also e.g. mailed to a colleague.

With the support of pdf i-Modulas could modernize the report interface without too large technical efforts.

Experiences with txt2pdf
We were amazed how simple we could integrate txt2pdf with our i-Modulas application. The initial coding took about two days. During a long test period we experienced some problems which mainly had to do with the fact that during all the years we had included some tricks in our text reports to solve all kinds of printer problems. Some of these had to do with page handling and they conflicted with txt2pdf. We found Sanface prepared to help us with this, but in the end decided to solve this issue ourselves. We now use a kind of filter technique to filter the data before we pass it to txt2pdf. This has proved to be very effective and very reliable. Since then txt2pdf creates every day many pdf reports for all our users without any problems.