|
Information for
Reprographers
Reprographers and print shop personnel are a crucial part
of the architectural and engineering workflow. LineType Software,
Inc. is committed to working with this group of users to make the
processing of digitally signed PDFs convenient and profitable.
Providing support at your print shop for PDFs signed with
the Banjo plug-in is easy and inexpensive. It also gives your
company a competitive advantage by allowing your customers to save time
and money while creating higher-quality output.
How it works:
-
You download and install any variation of the Banjo
plug-in. See the Variations page
for a summary of the differences, and to determine which will work
best for you.
-
Each customer who wishes to send you digitally-signed
PDFs must first transmit to you a public version of his or her digital
certificate, which is then installed on your computer. This
process is covered in detail in the help
documentation. The certificate transfer only has to happen once
-- after that the user is set up to send signed PDFs at any time.
-
When a signed PDF is received, you open it up in Adobe
Acrobat or Adobe Reader and the digital signature is verified by the
Banjo plug-in (or the Banjo Verify plug-in).
-
The PDF is printed from Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader,
either directly to a Windows printer driver or to an intermediate
format such as a TIFF file that can be processed by print management
software.
-
See the Quick Start Guide
for a handy reference to these steps. This guide is based on the
Banjo Verify with Batch Print plug-in, but it would apply with slight
modifications to the free Banjo Verify plug-in as well.
-
If you would like to test the Banjo plug-in on some
actual signed PDFs, then download the Banjo
Sample Files -- these include some signed large-format drawings,
the public version of the certificate used to sign the drawings, and
the Quick Start Guide. Be sure to read the Quick Start Guide and
the plug-in documentation prior to using the sample files.
Customer benefits:
-
Time savings: When customers have to sign
and stamp drawings individually, they generally must drive to your
business, stand there and sign each sheet of drawings, and then drive
back to the office. With a digital signature, the customer signs
each page of the PDF digitally when it is created, and will not need
to see the drawings again until the final prints are delivered.
-
Better quality: In the traditional
hand-signing method, an original set of signed paper drawings must be
scanned and reproduced to create copies. This adds one
generation to the process, with a loss of image quality. When
digital signatures are used, each print comes directly from the
digital file, so it has the appearance of an original.
-
Cost savings: When the architect or
engineer is in a different state than the client, signed drawings must
be sent via mail, often at a significant cost. Digital
signatures allow these drawings to be sent electronically and printed
at the client's convenience.
Integrating Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader into your
workflow:
Both the Banjo plug-in and the Banjo Verify plug-in have
an optional batch print feature. This feature has been designed
specifically for reprographers, to make processing of signed PDFs faster
and more convenient. See the Variations
page for a description of the options.
Many reprographers use plot management software, such as
PlotWorks or ReproDesk, to drive their plotters. Some minor
adjustments to your standard workflow will be needed to support digitally
signed PDFs.
A digitally signed PDF must be processed by Adobe
Acrobat or Adobe Reader, using either the Banjo plug-in or the Banjo
Verify plug-in. If you process a digitally signed PDF directly with
the PDF interpreter sold with PlotWorks or ReproDesk, the digital signature
will display as "Unverified" because the PDF interpreter will
not be able to recognize or validate the signature.
There are two ways to handle this issue.
If you have Windows printer drivers for your
large-format printers, you can print from Acrobat or Reader to these
drivers. This bypasses the plot management software.
If you wish to keep the plot management software in the
process, then an intermediate TIFF file should be used:
-
Open the signed PDF in Acrobat or Reader, and validate
the signature using either the Banjo plug-in or the Banjo Verify
plug-in.
-
Print the PDF to a TIFF printer driver, such as the
free PDFCreator driver. The Banjo
batch print feature is
recommended if you need to print many PDFs at once, or if you need to
create multiple single-page TIFFs from a multi-page PDF.
-
Process the TIFF files with the plot-management
software, and create paper plots.
This second method is similar in concept to scanning a
signed paper document and creating a TIFF file, except that the original
here is a PDF, not paper. The TIFF that is created by the TIFF
printer driver has an image of the digital signature on it, but the TIFF
itself is not digitally signed. The digital signature remains on the
PDF, and the TIFF is just an image file, the same as a scanned paper
document.
Frequently-asked questions:
Be sure to read the Frequently-asked
Questions from Architects and Engineers and the General
FAQ for answers to many of the questions you may have. The other
questions listed here are specific to reprographers.
Which variation of the Banjo plug-in should we use?
See the Variations page
for complete information. If you only need to verify
digital signatures on PDFs that customers send to you, then the Banjo
Verify plug-in is all you need. If you have a need to create your
own digitally-signed documents, then use the Banjo plug-in.
For anyone who does more than occasional printing, the
batch print option for either the Banjo plug-in or
the Banjo Verify plug-in is highly recommended. This feature
allows you to select several PDFs at once and print them all in
sequence, and it can separate a multi-page PDF into separate single-page
print jobs, which is useful when printing to a TIFF printer driver.
If we need to print to a TIFF printer driver, which
one should we use?
There are many options, but be sure to try the
open-source (free) PDFCreator driver (the
name is deceptive). It works well with
the batch print feature in the Banjo plug-in, and it allows for
unattended creation of TIFF or JPEG files from PDFs. See the PDFCreator page for more information on this driver.
There are also a variety of TIFF image printer drivers that
are commercially available (just do an internet search for "TIFF
printer").
The help file documentation
for the Banjo and Banjo Verify plug-ins with Batch Print contains an
appendix that addresses PDFCreator printer settings in detail.
Can the batch print feature be used to print unsigned
PDFs as well?
Yes. The batch print feature can be used with any
PDF, digitally signed or not.
How will we know if a PDF we receive is signed or
not? We would rather process unsigned PDFs with our plot management
software.
If you need to distinguish between signed and unsigned
PDFs, suggest a standard naming system to your customers. A simple
suffix on the file name may be the best way. For instance:
| 2007-098-A11.PDF |
Represents an unsigned PDF |
| 2007-098-A11-DS.PDF |
Represents a digitally-signed PDF |
Can we print color PDFs with this system?
Yes. The process is the same for either black and
white or color documents. If you are using a TIFF printer driver
to convert signed PDFs to image files that can be processed by plot
management software, then the conversion settings may need to be changed
to support color output.
|
