8.4

The 20,000 patterns are, however, not all available when generating documents. There are 8
"demo"patterns that are used to generate documents when PlanetPress Capture is in demo mode (no
license activated), and react the same way that the bulk of the 20,000 patterns. Another single pattern is
used to register pens in the database, and one last single pattern is used when printing a "Preview"from
PReS Connect. So in reality, the number of available patterns for document generation is 19990, but for
simplicity's sake this FAQuses the round number "20,000".
In a typical PlanetPress Capture implementation, a process in PReS Workflow 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. PReS Workflow 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 document and sends the pen data to PReS Workflow (through a docking
station or through Bluetooth), if the required conditions 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. Basically, 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 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