8.4

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 patterns 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 missing 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.
Using separate PlanetPress Workflow 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 Workflow 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 courier), sign it there and send it back -
this would cause errors that would be hard to prevent and correct. In this scenario however, it's possible to
centralize the activation of pen licenses to one server, while keeping the pattern generation systems
separate.
Using Pattern Sequences
In the event where a single location generates all the patterns and this output *can* be split into multiple
logical zones, Pattern Sequences can be used. A Pattern Sequence is basically a "tag" that is added after
the pattern's identification (Pattern ID). When a Pattern Sequence is used, each Pattern Sequence can re-
use each of the 20,000 available patterns. "Zones", in this case, could refer to a specific region within a city,
or a whole city or a province, whatever fits your needs.