PlanetPress Capture Workflow

PlanetPress Capture, introduced in PlanetPress 7.2 and enhanced ever since, is a set of tools that is used to simplify digital archiving processes by capturing information from a special pen which records everything it writes on paper, as long as this paper contains special Anoto Patterns.

There are important considerations to keep in mind when dealing with PlanetPress Capture. Please review them in PlanetPress Capture Implementation Restrictions.

In order to properly build a PlanetPress Capture workflow, it is very important to understand the terminology, implications and limitations of the technology. This is the first part of this section:

There are also 2 external tools that are used to communicate the pen's data to PlanetPress Workflow:

Creating a Capture-Ready document

This is done when creating your PlanetPress Design document. Adding one or more PlanetPress Capture fields to a PlanetPress Design document creates a capture-ready document, which can be used in the workflow. For more information, see the PlanetPress Design User Guide.

Generating the Capture Patterns

Once your document is created, the Capture Fields Generator action task is used to apply the capture patterns to each of your documents and send them to the printer. This printing process will consist of:

Retrieving your data file.
Creating metadata (See Create Metadata).
Separating each individual document in the metadata (this can be done in your Design document or through the Metadata Level Creation action task).
Using the Capture Fields Generator action task to generate the capture patterns
Printing your documents.

Capturing and Archiving

After the printed documents have been inked with the Anoto Digital Pen, the PGC files from the pen must be processed and merged with the appropriate documents in the PlanetPress Capture Database. A workflow process that receives PGC files and reads them in turn consists of the following actions:

An HTTP Server Input task or Folder Capture task that receives the PGC.
The Capture Fields Processor, which converts each PGC in an EPS layer, adds this layer to the PDF in the database, releases patterns and closes documents.
Optionally, a Capture Condition task to do post-processing using the Capture Fields data.
A Get Capture Document action task to retrieve each document in the database and output a PDF file
Any existing output such as Output to Folder, email, ftp, etc.

Because of timeout limitations, it is generally a good idea to use the Send immediate response to client option of the HTTP Server Input task, especially when processing a large amount of documents from the pen. Additionally, HTTP Server Processes should always be self-replicating and have a short polling interval set in their properties.

Managing and Post-Processing

There are a couple of things that can be done even after documents have been inked. As long as a document remains open, it is still present in the Capture database and be used in a process:

The Find Capture Documents input task is used to retrieve a list of documents under specific criteria.
The Capture Condition and Get Capture Document tasks are used to effect post-processing and retrieve document from the Capture database.

Error Handling

Whenever an error occurs during the Capture Field Processor phase, it is of course important to be able to handles these errors. For this purpose, the PGC to PDF Converter task was added with PlanetPress 7.4, adding the ability to quickly and directly convert a PGC file to a blank PDF file containing the ink data as an EPS layer. This is useful when, for example, data is received for a document that's already been closed.