Appligent keen on Mac OS X

Appligent Inc. announced a new line of server applications for Mac OS X earlier this year. Though the demand for the products — to handle high-volume and on-demand production needs of electronic publishers — hasn’t lived up to expectations, the company plans on keeping up the support as Mac OS X makes inroads into the server side of things.

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“We make server based applications for customizing and manipulating PDF content,” Appligent President Virginia Gavin told MacCentral. “We’ve seen a lot of people interested in Mac OS X on the desktop, but the vast majority of our customers aren’t running it on servers, though, of course, some on the forefront of publishing are.”

Mac OS X support will continue, especially as most of Appligent’s development starts on the Mac, she said. It’s then ported to other platforms.

“Mac OS X is a good development environment,” Gavin said. “Even if not a lot of our customers are using it in the server environment yet, we definitely like Mac OS X.”

And she hopes that the operating system will gain ground in this area.

“Mac OS X offers a lot of great benefits,” Gavin said. “There are certainly advantages to switching from, say, a Windows server to a Mac server, but, of course, that depends on a company’s IS department. But if they could see the value of Mac OS X as server platform, it would make a difference.”

Appligent’s products include:

AppendPDF, which enables you to create one PDF file from lists of several PDF files, or lists of page ranges within PDF files;

AppendPDF Pro, a “pro” version of the software that adds the dynamic generation of cover page, tables of contents pages with hyperlinks and bookmarks, page stamping, add additional text or images and more;

APStripFiles, a command line application that removes attached or embedded files from PDF documents, enabling you to protect your system from malicious unwanted PDF file attachments;

FDFMerge, which lets you create completed PDF forms by merging or stamping FDF data. Supports text and JPEG image stamping;

StampPDF Batch, which allows you to custom-stamp text and JPEG images into single or multiple PDF documents;

SecurSign, which lets you apply security features to large volumes of documents automatically using Acrobat’s standard security mechanisms. It can also process documents in batch mode or dynamically and handle digital signatures. APCrypt, released in August, is a “little brother” of SecurSign, with many of the same functions, but lacking the ability to do digital signatures.

There’s also APUtilities, a collection of command-line tools that each perform a specific function or grab info from PDF documents. Available separate or in a complete package containing all six, they include:

APGetFormFields, a utility for extracting form field information from a PDF Form;

APGetMetaData, which will export XML Meta data on a document that has been saved in or created by Adobe Acrobat 5.

APGetBookmarks, which lets you get the complete bookmark tree with page numbers and named destinations;

APGetPageCount, a utility that returns the number of pages in a PDF document;

APGetInfo, which provides text output of information similar to that found with Adobe Acrobat’s Document Information feature, with several added statistics;

APSaveAs, a utility that performs the same task as using the “Save As” feature in Acrobat.