Watch our video in order to learn how to configure multipage documents in ABBYY FlexiCapture FlexiLayout Studio.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you how we can process a multipage document or even a single document that may have multiple individual documents in it such as a PDF that contains multiple documents that are referenced within it. What we’re going to do is create a new FlexiLayout project. We’ll give it a proper name and then we’ll move on to a properties window. This properties window shows us down here at the bottom, a checkbox that says allow multipage documents. This is very, very important. In this given scenario, we do want to set a proper minimum number of pages and maximum number of pages. If we know a maximum. Sometimes in a business situation we may not be able to predict how many pages or how much the maximum pages of a document can be, and in this case, if we don’t know the maximum, we can write I N F stands for infinity and that means the software is going to allow us to have a variable number of documents or even pages within a document.
The next step that we’ll do is we will upload a document. I have a PDF here that I’m going to show you. This PDF obviously has multiple pages. This is the price list document, and so I have prices that span multiple pages. However, you’ll notice that this is the beginning of a brand new price list even within the single documents. So in today’s video we have one PDF that contains multiple pages but even contains multiple documents with multiple pages. So what we’re going to do is upload this document. I’m just going to drag and drop the document and let the software process this.
Now that the documents are processed, what we are going to do is we’re going to assign proper search elements to these. Specifically a header and a footer. Header and footer are critical in to telling the software where a document starts and stops, it even is critical when we want to automatically split a document and process them accordingly. For today’s demo, I’m actually going to disable the footer. If you can predict a footer of a document or a set of documents, it’s very important that you do so, but in today to keep it a simple and short demo for you, we will show you how to add a header. What we’re going to do is we’re going to add a static text header and we’re going to look for the word price list at the beginning of each document that I’ve showed you here. So I’m just going to call this my “Price List” header.
We’re going to look for the word “Price List”. And before I move on, I’m going to make this a required element. So in other words, in order for a document to be considered a header, it will have to find the word “Price List” on the document in some location. Now that I’ve done that, I’m going to go ahead and show you what happens if we right click and match the whole batch of documents here. First off, what I’ll show you is there are lines that come up here. The blue line indicates what I would refer to as a baseline or even a reference line. That is what we are telling the software we know about the document and how a document starts and stops. The red line indicates that ABBYY is recognizing something different than what we are considering the reference or the baseline and the reason why that is is because we’ve uploaded a document with multiple documents within it so we haven’t been able to split it at this point.
Even though the software after we’ve right-clicked and matched is saying that it recognizes that perhaps the word “Price List” is actually located on page one and page four of the document. Therefore making it two separate documents. So in this case it may be helpful for us as end users to go ahead and set what we call a reference document. And what we do is we right click on those pages and we will assemble to a reference document. Now I’m going to uncheck this last one because I disabled my footer, but what we’re telling here is we’re telling the FlexiLayout how to reference this or actually to say it another way, what is the truth or what is the reality of how these documents are split and now that I’ve processed them and set that reference document, you can actually see here that instead of a red line we have a green line and the green line is simply an indicator that ABBYY FlexiCapture agrees with how we’ve split the document.
So if we select them all and right click match, you can see once again the items in blue are what I told the software, how it should be in reality and green is what ABBYY actually is performing automatically. So in this case, when we see a green line that matches the blue line, that means the software agrees with what we’re telling it should be the actual splitting. To emphasize though when we’re processing a multipage document, the most important things you should be able to do is set up the header and a footer if applicable on the footer. But header and footer is what tells the software when to start and stop a new document. And in the multipage or multidocument world, this is absolutely critical. From here, of course, we can process these, we can add additional elements. If you’re not sure how to control additional elements, please reference our video libraries for additional feedback there and how to videos. But once we’ve been able to split the document and have them referenced correctly with these green lines matching our blue lines, that means we now have the ability to process a multipage and potentially even a multidocument single document. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. If you have any other questions, please reach out to us. Thank you.