Technical FAQs

Information is critically important for organizations of all sizes, but it’s especially vital for large enterprises. Without access to accurate data, it can be difficult for separate departments to coordinate efforts or for leadership to make informed decisions. Important files can quickly be lost in a complex web of IT systems, some of which may not even be able to directly communicate with each other. Developers have worked hard to address these challenges by building content management platforms that integrate various technology resources into a single system and provide a primary source of digital information.

What Is an Enterprise Content Management System?

Today’s enterprises have massive amounts of information at their disposal. Much of that data, however, is scattered across the organization in different repositories, folders, archives, and file shares. A great deal of valuable insights could be found there, including information about customers, market trends, and product feedback, but so long as it remains spread across different locations, it can be difficult to access and view in totality.

Enterprise content management (ECM) systems help organizations to create a more workable structure for business knowledge. By implementing document automation and data capture tools, they can quickly assess and process information flowing into the enterprise to identify its value and route it to the proper destination.

A typical ECM system uses a few key steps when processing incoming information. These steps form the basis of the enterprise’s document or content lifecycle:

• Capture: First, the information needs to enter the system in some way. This usually takes the form of document files or images being uploaded into the ECM.
• Manage: Documents and other files need to be identified and labeled for accurate storage and easy access. Simply uploading content into the system without doing anything to organize it quickly results in content chaos. 
• Storage: Whether the ECM utilizes physical, on-premises storage or cloud-based storage (or some combination of the two), the system needs to use a clearly defined structure when saving content so it can be easily located in the future. A database should contain all the necessary metadata to indicate where each file is stored.
• Retrieval: Without some way of easily retrieving the right information when it’s needed, an ECM system isn’t going to be able to reach its full potential. Stored documents and files need to be accessible quickly and easily so they can help to inform key business decisions.

Avoiding Content Chaos with Barcodes

Without some way of effectively tracking documents through an ECM, organizations can quickly fall prey to “content chaos,” in which there is an abundance of information available but no easy way to access the right content at the appropriate time. This can be particularly frustrating for an enterprise that already has effective data capture and file conversion capabilities in place because without an effective retrieval mechanism, a great deal of valuable information will often go unused or even unnoticed.

Fortunately, ECM developers can provide a simple solution to this problem by utilizing barcode recognition technology. Although barcodes have been a mainstay of inventory management for decades across many industries, they’re finding a new use case in document management systems.

Rather than manually indexing documents with alphanumeric account number strings, barcodes can be created and applied to documents at the point of capture and then automatically routed to the proper storage destination. Once the barcode is scanned, key information about the file is uploaded into the ECM database so it can be easily located and retrieved in the future.

Another key benefit of barcodes is their ability to link documents that need to be associated with one another as part of the same batch. When documents are captured and converted into a digital format, one or more barcodes can be assigned to them to indicate connections to other file types. That information will be uploaded into the ECM database when the barcodes are scanned, instantly creating a traceable record of where files are located. 

This is especially important for situations where different information types could be stored in different locations. For instance, architectural drawings for a project may be stored in one location, but financial documents related to the same project may be stored elsewhere. When one of the files is accessed, the ECM’s database will indicate that there are related files in other locations and provide a link to them. This is particularly important for large enterprises with content spread across multiple departments that could easily be overlooked.

Build a Better Enterprise Content Management System with Barcode Xpress

Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress SDK provides powerful barcode support that’s designed to address the specific needs of document barcodes. While some software is oriented toward retail or supply chain applications, Barcode Xpress is optimized for document management, which makes it ideal for ECM systems. The SDK’s barcode reader can accurately locate and decode multiple barcodes on each page at incredibly high speeds.

With support for over 30 unique barcode types, Barcode Xpress provides tremendous flexibility when it comes to content management. Developers can also generate and detect both 1D and 2D barcodes to create a diverse content ecosystem within their ECM platform. Barcode Xpress can easily identify and recognize barcodes no matter where they’re located (and oriented) on the page. It can even accurately register incomplete barcodes from just a few intact lines.

To learn more about how Barcode Xpress can enhance your enterprise content management system, download our detailed fact sheet for a closer look at the barcode SDK’s capabilities.

Ever since Mozilla’s development of the open-source PDF.js library in 2011, many developers have been quick to utilize the JavaScript-based toolkit to quickly integrate PDF viewing capabilities into their applications. Given the severe limitations and security concerns associated with external reader plug-ins, it’s easy to see why the open source library was so appealing. 

Unfortunately, many development teams that lacked experience with document management and image rendering quickly discovered that PDF.js lacked many of the core features they expected from a PDF reader. Front and center among these capabilities was JavaScript PDF annotation, which is essential for almost any application that manages documents. That’s why Accusoft set out to build a lightweight SDK upon the PDF.js library that, among other things, added a vital annotation layer to the viewer.

Making PDF.js Draw Annotations

The PDF.js library consists of three different layers that all work together to render and display files. A core layer interprets the binary data in a file before passing it on to a display layer that renders the PDF itself into a <canvas> element. The viewer layer provides the main interface that allows people to view and interact with the file. Out of the box, however, the viewing layer doesn’t provide much in the way of functionality. Interaction is fairly limited without substantial extra development work to add capabilities like mobile screen responsiveness or high fidelity zoom. The core and display layers also don’t display the full PDF specification and struggle with lengthy documents and image-intensive files.

When our team started developing Accusoft PDF Viewer, the very first step was to shore up those support and rendering deficiencies. After making a number of key optimizations to improve rendering speed and fidelity, search speed, and mobile responsiveness, adding a PDF.js annotation layer was among the first priorities. This process was made a bit easier since Accusoft PDF Viewer uses a custom-built viewing layer rather than the default PDF.js viewing layer. In addition to providing a number of performance benefits, building a new viewer gave the team a great deal of control over how users can view and interact with documents.

One of the primary goals of developing this lightweight PDF SDK was that functionality could not come at the expense of performance. The new layer for JavaScript PDF annotations sits atop the PDF.js library, which preserves rendering speed and fidelity while also making it easy for developers to access and utilize annotation features. Since the rendered document is easily accessible, any annotations associated with it can still be retrieved and loaded within the viewing layer.

Anatomy of JavaScript PDF Annotations in Accusoft PDF Viewer

The Professional version of Accusoft PDF Viewer supports multiple different types of annotations, all of which can be incorporated into the customized user interface. This allows developers to quickly integrate PDF viewing capabilities into web applications, enable annotation controls, and then retrieve and load markups whenever the file is retrieved for viewing. 

In order to retrieve JavaScript PDF annotations, developers can use the getAnnotations function. This effectively exports a copy of the annotations made in one viewer so they can be loaded into a different viewer. It’s important to remember that the returned objects are a copy of the annotations, so any changes made to them will not affect the annotations in the original viewer. Furthermore, any changes made to the annotations in the original viewer will not be reflected in the exported versions. To update them, the getAnnotations function would need to be used again.

JavaScript PDF Annotation Tools in Accusoft PDF Viewer Professional

Accusoft PDF Viewer Professional offers several annotation tools. Since the SDK allows developers to customize the viewing interface to fit their application’s needs, one or all of these markup types may be removed from the toolbar if necessary. This may be desirable for situations where a document should only be available for viewing.

• Ellipse/Circle: A classic oval shape, the ellipse tool can be adjusted in a number of ways to expand its functionality. Developers can set qualities such as opacity, fill color, and border thickness as needed.
• Rectangle/Square: Typically used to draw boxes around text, the rectangle tool can be customized to meet annotation needs by altering the border thickness and color, adjusting opacity, or designating fill color.
• Line: Line markups are one of the more versatile annotation types. Accusoft PDF Viewer allows users to not only change the color and thickness of the line, but also to determine whether the line features a triangle end head, which allows it to serve as an arrow.
• Freehand Signature: Particularly useful for many document management applications, the freehand tool allows users to electronically sign documents or make freehand comments on a PDF. The JavaScript PDF annotation layer tracks the drawing path of the markup as a string value.

• Free Hand Annotation: The freehand annotation tool allows users to freely draw on a document using their mouse, finger, or stylus. It’s often used to provide quick feedback on a document, especially on mobile devices.
• Text Highlight: Much like a highlighter pen back in school, the text highlight tool can be used to select and apply a background color to text. When reviewing documents, it can be deployed to highlight sections of content that require closer attention in the future.

Unlock the PDF Potential of Your Application

The customizable PDF features of Accusoft PDF Viewer Professional allow developers to easily integrate powerful annotation capabilities into their application with just a few lines of code. Since the viewer’s JavaScript PDF annotations are made entirely within the web application, there’s no need to configure complicated servers that could impact performance or create additional points of failure. Developers can adjust the viewer interface or even remove the Accusoft branding to create a seamless viewing experience that gives them total control over how their files are viewed and potentially marked up using annotation tools.

Accusoft PDF Viewer was designed with responsive support for mobile displays right out of the box, making it an ideal solution for web applications accessed from multiple devices. It also incorporates three decades of Acusoft’s experience with image processing and document rendering to deliver a viewing experience that’s head and shoulders above open-source PDF.js solutions. Find out how easily your application can add high-performance PDF capabilities by downloading a trial of Accusoft PDF Viewer today. 

For over 30 years, Accusoft has developed groundbreaking digital imaging technology that has revolutionized the way applications manage and process content. From high-resolution image compression and file format conversion to data extraction and barcode recognition, Accusoft technology can be found in some of the most sophisticated and widely used software in the world. The company’s enduring success is built upon a combination of patented engineering innovations and key strategic acquisitions.

Humble Beginnings and Early Success

The origins of Accusoft go back to the late 1980s, when founder and CEO Jack Berlin got a hands-on look at one of the first digital cameras at a trade show and developed an interest in the nascent technology.

“I just fell in love with it and wanted to get involved in digital imaging,” he recalls. That desire led Berlin to found Pegasus Imaging Corporation in September of 1991. “It started as a hobby, but it became serious pretty fast.”

The company quickly found its niche selling innovative image compression and decompression technology that software developers could incorporate into their applications. Over the next decade, Pegasus Imaging made a name for itself thanks to advancements in lossy and lossless JPEG compression that were adopted by leading photo imaging companies such as Kodak, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, and Konica Minolta.

In 1998, Pegasus Imaging expanded into medical imaging with the groundbreaking PICTools Medical SDK. The company quickly made a splash in the market by solving the infamous “DICOM bug” associated with the Cornell codec, an open-source codec frequently used for lossless JPEG compression. Pegasus Imaging’s engineers were able to identify why the codec rendered some images unreadable after decompression and provide a means of both compressing images safely and decompressing files once thought to be corrupted beyond repair. That ability to quickly solve imaging problems helped make PICTools Medical a major success with some of the world’s largest medical technology companies, including GE Healthcare, McKesson, Philips Medical Systems, Siemens Medical Solutions, and Toshiba.

Evolution and Expansion

Although Pegasus Imaging enjoyed a great deal of success in its first decade, Berlin knew the company needed to grow if it was going to retain a competitive edge in the 21st century.

“The challenge with the technology business is you have to improve it or lose it,” he says. “You don’t get to sell the same product ten years later. You have to continue to innovate.”

The early 2000s saw Pegasus Imaging embark on a series of acquisitions that helped expand its business and continue pushing the boundaries of innovating in digital imaging. Each merger involved a strategic consideration of how it would position the company to evolve to meet the complex challenges of the future.

“People typically want to buy growth, but we look at it differently,” Berlin says. “We’re a big believer that the reason to buy companies is their customers, their products, and their people. Products are worth nothing without their people.”

In 2004, Pegasus Imaging acquired TMSSequoia, which had developed the most sophisticated structured forms processing and document image cleanup technology in the world. The people behind that technology, however, proved even more valuable to the growing company, contributing to the development of several proprietary innovations over the years that followed. Their ongoing contributions can be seen in products like FormSuite, which remains an industry leader in forms processing technology.

The TMSSequoia acquisition, along with the development of its lightning fast ImagXpress toolkit, set Pegasus Imaging on the path to becoming a much bigger player in the document imaging market. Its next major acquisition came in 2008 with the purchase of AccuSoft, a Massachusetts-based imaging software company best known for its powerful ImageGear SDK. No sooner had the deal closed, then Pegasus Imaging expanded once again by acquiring the UK-based Tasman Software, which had developed groundbreaking barcode recognition technology that would eventually be incorporated into the popular Barcode Xpress SDK product.

Over the course of just a few years, Pegasus Imaging had greatly expanded its portfolio of document imaging and processing solutions by strategically identifying the technology and engineering talent that could fuel the company’s growth. To Berlin, making the most of those acquisition opportunities are critical to sustained success in a competitive industry:

“It’s grow or die. We’re up against larger and larger competitors. Consolidation gives you market share and economies of scale. If profitability goes up, you can invest in new product development, marketing, and growth.”

In 2009, Pegasus Imaging changed its name to Accusoft Pegasus to rebrand the company as a key player to watch in the document imaging and processing industry.

Integration and Innovation

The acquisition of AccuSoft expanded the company’s market share and expertise, but it also created a new challenge for the engineering team. AccuSoft’s ImageGear SDK frequently competed directly with Pegasus Imaging’s ImagXpress. While there was no question that the newly rebranded Accusoft Pegasus would continue to support customers using these products, strategic decisions had to be made about their respective futures.

As the team evaluated each product, it quickly became clear they were the result of very different approaches to software development.

“ImagXpress was much easier to use, but it didn’t have all the platforms and features of ImageGear,” Berlin recalls. “Their idea was to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the product, and if somebody complained, fix it. Pegasus wanted to make everything perfect and add features very slowly. I think there was a happy medium there somewhere.”

ImageGear’s ability to support multiple platforms and the rapid development of modern compilers eventually made it a more attractive SDK for developers, but the Accusoft Pegasus team incorporated the best features of ImagXpress into it to make ImageGear an even better product. Throughout the integration, the company put new processes into place to strike a balance between speed and perfection. Product management structures were also established to improve feedback loops, lay down feature roadmaps, and keep to development timelines without compromising quality.

All of these lessons would prove invaluable when Accusoft Pegasus acquired Adeptol in 2011 and added the company’s AJAX Document Viewer to its portfolio. While Adeptol’s browser-based viewing technology was undoubtedly innovative and correctly predicted what future web applications would require from viewing integrations, the product itself was Flash-based. In addition to being a proprietary technology, Flash contained multiple security vulnerabilities and was already on the decline by 2011.

The Accusoft Pegasus team got to work rebuilding the viewer using HTML5, making it much easier for developers to incorporate viewing features into web-based applications. As the new product took shape, it also allowed the company to expand into the growing market for cloud-based API integration products. Released as Prizm Content Connect in 2012, the HTML5 viewer would be rebranded in 2016 as PrizmDoc.

30 Years of Growth and Innovation

In 2012, Accusoft Pegasus rebranded once again to become Accusoft. Today, the company remains a pillar of the tech community in Tampa, FL even as it strives to expand its business globally. In 2021, Accusoft celebrated its 30th anniversary, a significant milestone for a privately held, employee-owned corporation that began as a hobby.

For Berlin, those humble origins and the long journey to success are what make a company like Accusoft special.

“It’s not just dollars and cents, but a sense of pride and competitiveness,” he says. “It stops being about money at some decimal point. It’s about the people and the legacy and seeing what you can do. We give back a lot to our community. I really enjoy that. We participate in our community, both in tech forums and charity drives and work days. If we cease being Accusoft or cease being Accusoft in Tampa, FL, that’s gone.”

Accusoft and Snowbound Join Forces

That same sense of pride and passion was shared by Simon Wieczner, President, CEO, and co-founder of Snowbound Software. Established in 1996, Snowbound first made a name for itself in the document imaging market with the RasterMaster conversion and imaging SDK. RasterMaster supports hundreds of formats and uses proprietary technology to quickly convert, archive, and display files in high resolution without loss of fidelity.

As two of the leading innovators in document imaging integrations, Snowbound and Accusoft routinely found themselves competing for the same customers over the years. “We were competitors, but not fierce competitors,” Wieczner recalls. “We would mostly run into each other at trade shows and talk about the market.”

Berlin first floated the idea of merging the two companies around 2015, but it wasn’t until much later that acquisition conversations turned serious. With so much money being invested in the tech industry over the previous decade, Snowbound had already received substantial interest from potential buyers, but most of the offers didn’t sit well with Wieczner.

“There’s been a craze over the last few years of growth equity companies looking for SDK companies,” he says. “They were offering good dollars, but without understanding our technology. So there was a little bit of distrust on my part. Some actually wanted to outsource everything and that would totally destroy the company.”

Many potential suitors were primarily interested in incorporating Snowbound’s technology into their own products rather than supporting existing customers and continuing to sell into the market. As conversations with Accusoft continued to progress, Wieczner realized that he’d already found the ideal acquisition partner.

“Accusoft understood the market, what our company did, and how we could fit together,” he says. “That’s why we felt ready to move on together.”

“Both Simon and I are passionate about the success of the company,” Berlin says. “It’s what small business people do. We tend to worship entrepreneurs that get in, build a shell, and get out with a billion dollars, but I don’t know if they’re fulfilled because there’s such fulfillment in seeing what you’ve built accomplish something.”

In late 2022, the companies moved ahead with a deal that saw Accusoft acquire Snowbound. The merger brings Snowbound’s RasterMaster^® and VirtualViewer^® products into the portfolio of Accusoft solutions:

• RasterMaster^®: A Java-based conversion and imaging SDK, RasterMaster can be incorporated into applications for all computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac. The SDK supports hundreds of document types through its proprietary format library and provides a variety of document imaging tools, such as annotations, redactions, OCR, text extraction, and image cleanup.
• PrizmDoc^® for Java, formerly VirtualViewer^®: Developed to meet the demanding needs of the banking industry, PrizmDoc® for Java is an HTML5-based viewer that can be easily incorporated into web applications to allow users to view, annotate, and redact documents and images from any platform, anywhere. PrizmDoc® for Java’s library of APIs and out-of-the-box connectors for popular ECM applications (including Alfresco, IBM, and Pegasystems) make it a powerful tool for developers looking to quickly integrate advanced document workflow capabilities.

The Future

In keeping with Accusoft’s long history of strategic acquisitions, the Snowbound merger brings with it an influx of new customers, new technology, and new talent into the Accusoft family. Those resources will help the company to continue investing in innovation to compete in an increasingly high-stakes market.

“It’s a real challenge to incorporate other companies and take that risk, but they’ve done well with it,” Wieczner says. “We were deliberate in selecting an organization with a leadership team and product portfolio that would continue to grow, develop, and nurture what we have built at Snowbound.”

With three decades of experience and success to draw upon, Accusoft is better positioned than ever to meet the evolving needs of its customers and deliver a new generation of document imaging products powered by groundbreaking technology.