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Appligent, Inc. Wednesday introduced its APSplit Desktop Edition, a standalone desktop application for preparing PDFs to meet the document-size requirements imposed by courts and other government institutions on electronic filing submissions.
APSplit DE is a drag-and-drop desktop application that enables users to deliver large PDF documents in compliance with an institutions sizing requirements.
It is aimed at lawyers and other professionals who submit electronic documents that must be no larger than a specified size, the company said.
“Legal professionals have asked for an easy-to-use PDF processing tool that doesnt rely on server-based software or Adobe Acrobat,” said Appligent president Virginia Gavin.
“APSplit DE is designed for the average user, but also has scalability for IT professionals.”
APSplit DE can split files by size or number of pages and automatically rename them. It also can be used with a single file or collection of documents, the Lansdowne, Pa.-based company said.
“Users can do the same thing using Acrobat, but its cumbersome,” Gavin told Ziff Davis Internet. “This application just takes a few seconds.”
Electronic filing of court and other documents is becoming increasingly popular, and PDF is one of the required standard file formats.
Each jurisdiction or organization specifies the rules that determine the size of the documents in the filing. One state court might require that each document be no larger than 1,000 pages or 1MB (1,000KB), while another might require filings of 1,500 pages or 2MB.
“Legal papers and government documents also need to be backward-compatible with display applications,” Gavin said.
“Some word processing programs do not allow backward-compatible file reading and printing. PDF solves this.”
Page fidelity is also an important factor in legal record-keeping, Gavin told Ziff Davis Internet.
“A lawyer, judge or other user must be able to refer readers to Page 327, for example, and be sure that the information needed is indeed on Page 327, and not on Page 326 or 328.
“Word and WordPerfect documents have a flow-through design in which data can be moved [depending upon the parameters set on the particular application currently being used],” Gavin said.
On Sept. 23, the state of Massachusetts decreed that all state office documents would need to be filed in either PDF or OpenDocument form, starting on Jan. 1, 2007.
Other local and regional U.S. jurisdictions are also taking the open document requirement under consideration.
APSplit DE provides users a way to specify the maximum size in the number of pages or kilobytes. Files also can be split as individual pages, by page ranges or by bookmarks.
APSplit DE also supports linearized PDF output, which enables a user to view the first pages of a PDF document while it is still being downloaded from the Internet.
APSplit DE runs in a Windows environment on multiple platforms, and is available for Windows NT/2000/XP, Red Hat Linux and Mac OS X.
Pricing is $199.00 per user. A 30-day trial version of APSplit Desktop Edition is available for download here.