James Rile is the managing partner of James Rile Associates (JRA), a software design and development bureau in business for 18 years, and specializing in digital publishing and document imaging systems since 1994. Jim was one of the first persons to use the Acrobat Capture product to produce digital publications in PDF I+T (image + text) format. This included a landmark publication of the entire run of The Craftsman, a magazine printed between 1897 and 1918, on CD-ROM. This was the also the first project to produce the PDF image + text format using grayscale and color images.
JRA has delivered document imaging and publishing systems to Xerox and Kodak clients including the Savannah River Nuclear Energy Facility, Johns Hopkins University, and Odyssey Press.
A pioneer in document image enhancement processes, Jim produced the first "rapid manual cleanup editor", called FirstPage, with "virtual document separation" capabilities.
In 1999, Jim undertook the development of a web-based document management system for MIT, which features an automated paper-to-PDF-to-web production process. To date, over 400,000 paper documents have been converted and made available on the web. This project initiated the development of a web-based search and retrieval product by James Rile Associates that is capable of full-text searching of PDF files, with search term highlighting and intelligent page downloading. This is available as a commercial product called SearchPDF. This same search product has now supports searchable DjVu files in addition to PDF files. Searchable DjVu files are superior to searchable Image + Text PDF files in many ways, and are the next evolutionary step in the process of putting paper on the web.
JRA is pioneering the use of embedded metadata in digital documents, which eliminates the need for an external database and which restores true portability to digital documents. This approach was favorably reviewed in the December 2000 edition of PC-AI magazine. Metadata (index fields) can be embedded in PDF files, and now the same feature is being developed for the DjVu format.
JRA opened www.planetdjvu.com in August of 2001 as a commercial forum and portal site for DjVu users and developers. JRA opened www.searchpdf.com in November, 2002 as the successor to the www.pdfwebsearch.com site, for the sale and promotion of commercial JRA software products.
JRA has now moved the store from SearchPDF to PlanetDjVu effective January, 2004, concurrent with the release of JRAPublish 2.0 and our new status as an authorized reseller of DjVu products from LizardTech.
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