AbridgePDF summarizes multiple items of interests from PDFs, complete with hyperlinks back to the original source documents.With an eye for helping both professionals and students organize large collections of electronic documents, Appligent on Tuesday announced the release of AbridgePDF, a plug-in utility for PDF documents.
The Landsowne, Pa., company, which specializes in PDF-related software, was originally inspired to design the product based on its internal PDF-management needs.
"We have a lot of folks here who are working with multiple PDFs on a daily basis, so we are always trying to find new ways to organize the important information," said Victor Votsch, director of corporate communications at Appligent.
Enter AbridgePDF, an Adobe Acrobat plug-in that summarizes multiple items of interests from PDFs.
"And then we realized, it's not just inside the company, but really anybody who does research using PDF will find this useful," Votsch said.
AbridgePDF uses existing Adobe Standard Markup information from multiple documents and creates a new file to store those details, along with hyperlinks back to the original source documents.
Click here to read more about Appligent's recent update to SecurSign.
This service is targeted toward anyone who works with multiple electronic documents and needs help creating things such as summaries, concordances and lists of citations, but who also wants instant access to the source documents. The new summary documents are flexible enough to be marked up again, creating a layered, linked synopsis.
"You can actually create summaries of summaries," Votsch said.
Other features include a sort order control, which helps the user define a sort order for the markups extracted, and a choice of display options, which lets the user display results in a table based on personal specifications.
But Votsch cited AbridgePDF's ability to use the built-in capabilities of Acrobat among its most useful features. "It takes the existing markup capabilities—underscoring right through highlighting—and uses those as the methods for organizing content."
Abridge PDF works as a plug-in for Acrobat 5, 6 and 7 running on Windows 2000 and above. It costs $99 and is available directly from Appligent's online store.
Originally founded as a software consultancy in 1988 by Mark Garvin, Appligent transitioned to offering commercial software applications such as plug-in and server- based production-grade tools for the on-demand customization, manipulation and delivery of dynamically generated electronic documents.
Virginia Gavin joined the company in 1991 to help lead its transition. It has five other families to address the needs of PDF manipulation: appending/publishing, redaction, forms processing, stamping and security.
Appligent's history with commercial PDF software applications management began in 1993, when it was the first to build a PDF parser to extract document structure information from PDF files, an application then utilized in electronic new drug applications filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The next year, the company was the first to develop a stand-alone PDF viewer. This application was presented to the National Institute of Standards and Technology as proof that PDF files can be viewed without using any Adobe Systems Inc. technology.
In 1997, Appligent created the Acrobat portion of Authentica's PageRecall application, arguably the most secure PDF security technology available.
In recent years, Appligent was first with its SecurSign application, which digitally signs PDF files, and it also released Redax Enterprise Server in 2003, a server-based solution for redacting PDF documents.
And with its PowerMerge application launched last year, Appligent was first to support PDF form templates for mass generation of data-intensive electronic forms.
Document Management 
