What is TMC?
Elan GMK Technical Manual Converter (TMC) provides an automated way to accurately convert large volumes of documents into interactive, searchable, highly marked-up PDF files.
By automating he conversion process, TMC dramatically reduces the cost-per-page of document processing and conversion. Black and white, color, and oversized documents can be scanned and the resulting images automatically cleaned-up using TMC’s advanced image processing capabilities.
TMC has sophisticated content discovery and linking capabilities, but the batch image processing of sister product, PPP makes a good case for integration. Separating and later merging images based on canvas size and performing template-based image processing enables even OCR and linking in TMC for superior performance.
Who uses TMC?
By using TMC, organisations who produce high volumes of technical documentation that needs to be made available to internal or external audiences, can do so with ease.
Such organizations include those in manufacturing, aviation, defense, civil engineering, healthcare, pharmaceutical and more. Typically there are high volumes of current and archived paper based information that needs to be organised and made available in a systematic way.
With an easy to learn user interface and simple navigation TMC is easy to adopt and can handle large amounts of data from the outset.
TMC can help organizations structure and digitize their technical documentation by:
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- Handling mixed document sizes of engineering and manufacturing environments.
- Supporting a wide variety of graphic image types (B&W, grayscale and color originals), including PDF input.
- Easily manage and organize highly structured content of complex documents with large numbers of pages.
- Automatic content and link discovery to make documentation easily searchable.
Why TMC?
TMC has some specific capabilities that makes it popular with organizations who need to quickly and effectively organise their technical documentation and make it fully accessible and searchable. These include:
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- Automated creation of interlinked PDF documentation including book-marks and internal links for ease of searching.
- Use of Image+Text PDF output format for full text searching.
- Use of the best OCR for automated conversion reducing manual intervention.
- Creation of clean images suitable for printing and on-line viewing to improve quality.
- Batch processing for image clean-up and PDF conversion for speed.
- Time – scheduled processing of multiple jobs for efficiency.
- Network-optimized for multi-user environments.
- Powerful QA features, incorporated throughout the work-flow, for a high level of quality assurance.
How TMC works
To begin processing TMC performs the following tasks:
- Automatic, rule-based image separation
- Image content detection
- Margin positioning
- Odd-even page support
- Skew, punch-hole, speckle, border removal
- Comprehensive resize operations
Following image clean-up, content discovery and hierarchy building is performed. The internal structure of the document is discovered using highly automated methods with the help of OCR and parsing. The discovered document structure information will be later converted to PDF bookmarks. The following structure mining tools are available:
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- Table of Contents extraction
- Extraction of list items (Table of Illustrations, Table of Tables, list of pages etc…)
- Automatic page match between logical and physical pages
- Powerful QC tools to validate and correct links
The internal linking process will find certain references present on the page, and will establish a link to the correct page where the reference is present. These are text entities like Figure 3-2, or Tab. 21 and will be converted to a PDF internal link later on. The following features are present:
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- Customer-defined strings with template mask
- Comprehensive QC capabilities using visual feedback and fast navigation
- Manual editing of corrections and new links
PDF conversion is the last step in the conversion process. Our proven PDF libraries produce standards-compliant, highly interlinked and searchable documents. The output is Image + Text PDF format, and is optimized for WEB delivery. The following features are present:
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- Fully automatic conversion of several jobs
- Directory haunting
- Linearized PDF output
- Bookmark creation
- Internal linking