7.4

In a typical PlanetPress Capture implementation, a process in PlanetPress Production generates output (generally, this output
is directly printed) and, at the same time, will "lock" one pattern for each page that it generates, if that page contains a pattern.
PlanetPress Production also stores a copy of each document in the Capture Database, in PDF format.
While a document is printed, and while this printed document has not received any ink or signature, the document is deemed
"open", the pattern it uses remains locked in the database and cannot be re-used. Then, when someone writes on the doc-
ument and sends the pen data to PlanetPress Production (through a docking station or through bluetooth), if the required con-
ditions have been met, the document will be "closed", its pattern released and available to be used immediately.
An open document can also be called a "live" document, in the sense that it is only active between the time where it is printed
and the time where ink from the Anoto Digital Pen is processed and the document is closed. This duration is called "time to
live" or "TTL", and it is the second very important number: how long is the pattern actually needed.
The third important number is based on your actual output needs. In other words, how many documents do you intend to print
on a regular basis that will contain a pattern?
These three numbers, together, represent an easy way to determine if the 20,000 patterns are actually enough for you. Bas-
ically, if you generate X documents within a specific time frame but N of these documents are closed through regular process
(writing on them with a pen and docking it) during that period, does the difference between both ever reach 20,000?
EXAMPLE
Say you print 19,000 pages containing a pattern, every day. You may think you'll "run out of patterns" after a single day. But if
18,900 of these documents are being written to and processed within the day, at the end of the day you only have a 100 page
difference, possibly due to mistakes, lost pages, or errors during processing. In this specific example, you would run out of pat-
terns only after 10 days, assuming the numbers remained completely static. Since there are easy ways to deal with these
remainders (a simple automated process that, once a day, closes any document that is older than 48 hours, for example), a
correct implementation like this one would be perfectly functional and not be affected by the 20,000 page limit. Remember
however that this means that 19,000 physical sheets of paper are printed every day, and those 19,000 documents are written
on using one or more Anoto Digital Pens, which are then processed back into the system.
The example above actually uses numbers that are much higher than our typical PlanetPress Capture user. That is to say, a
vast majority of our users will never have to worry about reaching the pattern limitation, unless their implementation is miss-
ing important parts, such as the "cleanup" process. But this also means a smaller minority of our users may require more than
20,000 patterns, so let's deal with this now.
EXTENDING
There are actually 2 ways of dealing with extending the number of patterns using the currently available tools, each with its
own advantages and disadvantages.
1) Using separate PlanetPress Production servers and licenses.
In a scenario where there are multiple locations that use PlanetPress Capture and where neither pen nor paper has any risk of
being moved from one location to another, the easiest (but costlier) solution is to have a separate installation of PlanetPress
Production in each location. Each installation would be responsible for its own documents and pens. The limitation here is that
it would not be directly possible to send a page with an existing pattern to another location (either via email in PDF or via cour-
rier), sign it there and send it back - this would cause errors that would be hard to prevent and correct. In this scenario how-
ever, it's possible to centralize the activation of pen licences to one server, while keeping the pattern generation systems
separate.
Special Workflow Types