Strelley Hall, Nottingham-based Pafec Ltd has launched Pafec EDM for Imaging, aimed a companies converting large format engineering drawings into digital data. The product encompasses scanning, raster viewing, manipulation of images, document storage, document management and output. Although Pafec is targetting oil and gas exploration companies, it says that the product is also suitable for text, photographs, microfilm and video information. The product is a modular system and, says Pafec, this means companies can integrate it, or parts of it, with the document imaging systems of their choice, and with computer aided design applications, word processors and optical character recognition products. The full system uses an Oracle database for storing and managing the data. Pafec recommends magnetic disks in a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks format for storing on-line data, or optical disks for near-line, and the product has some hierarchical storage management. However, users can use their own database and any storage system they would like to use, says the company. Pafec EDM for Imaging can be used as a stand-alone product on an 80486 personal computer or better, on a Unix box, or it can be networked. For multiple users, Pafec recommends that the product run on an Unix server with personal computers accessing the applicaiton. Pafec says good performance has been achieved by minimising network traffic, processing and memory requirements: images are always handled and moved around the system in their compressed format, and this makes for small memory requirements and only small packets being transfered across the network. In a wide area network the system can be configured so that only the bits of the picture the user wants to study are transfered to the graphical front end: this is called ’tiling’, where the raster image is broken up and parts transmitted. Users can also view up to 10 different documents at the same time, copying, moving and deleting between images. The product has ‘smart raster’ which dynamically vectorises images. Pafec says that this enables users to make changes to images, offers computer-aided design-like fuctionality but is better than something like CAD overlay or paintbrush techniques. Computer-aided design diagrams can be stored, and viewed, at the front end, in either vector or raster form. The product has the facility to pan, zoom and create veiwports. Users can clean up images, or just parts of the image, at the the click of a button, after the scanning has been done. Modules available with product are personnel manager, which defines users rights; document manager for archiving and retrieval; work manager, which supports the management of a document’s life cycle; and distribution manager, which distributes documents. Pricing for the Imaging Viewer wtih snapshot browse for archive an retrieval costs ú1,000. The imaging view and edit version costs ú4,000 for one licence, ú3,500 for the second to fifth licence, and ú2,500 for sixth licence and over.
