Posted by Shelly on 09/23/07 11:26

"Sanders Kaufman" <bucky@kaufman.net> wrote in message
news:D7nJi.124$ua4.45@newssvr22.news.prodigy.net...
> "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?

Actually, that's probably the easy part. There are inexpensive packages out
there to that. What I would need is a command line application. The other
stuff looks like the hard stuff to me.

Shelly

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