Posted by Sanders Kaufman on 09/23/07 05:32

"Shelly" <sheldonlg.news@asap-consult.com> wrote in message
news:13fb0rcom0qur6e@corp.supernews.com...
> Here is a situation that I have to think out for a potential customer.
> Currently he receives about 150 emails a day with pdf attachments for
> orders. The format of the pdfs are all the same. Now he has to:
>
> 1 - look at his email
> 2 - open the pdf
> 3 - manually take the data from the pdf and enter it into an order
> processing mode and a database.
>
> This is taking so much of his time that he is considering hiring someone
> to do it.
>
> What I would like to be able to present him with is the following:
>
> 1 - Have all those emails go to a specified folder in his email
> 2 - Without opening the email, upload the attachment to a server
> 3 - Have an application that extracts the information from the pdf and
> then does what it has to do.
> 4 - Move the email to a second email folder (processed)
>
> I would like to have all this initiated with either a cron type job or via
> a "Go" button.
>
> Short of this ideal, I would have him look at an email in his reader and
> save the attachments to a directory. The "Go" button would upload button
> would then do the rest.
>
> There are also other compromises I can and probably will have to make. I
> posted the ideal.
> The main point is to cut the hyman time down considerably.
>
> Any suggestions?

Most of that stuff sounds pretty simple - but the PDF parsing might be your
deal-breaker.
You'll have to be a real PDF guru to do that.
Have you explored the PDF features in PHP?

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