Demolition Blog

This Howto was written when  Golden Software’s STRATER 2 was still around, a very clever software to transform raw borehole data into customised borehole and well construction logs. It describes how to produce a large number of STRATER logs as separate PDF files, and rename them according to fields (e.g. borehole ID) in the PDF file.

As STRATER runs under Microsoft Windows, the whole procedure is designed for application under MS Windows. The process is designed using free or low-cost software to enable small businesses to follow the steps with little financial effort. STRATER is able to batch print hundreds of logs as hard-copies. And yet, if you want to produce single PDF files instead of paper prints, you run into two walls.

In STRATER 2, you used to have the option to save one log at a time in PDF format and you need to name it individually. STRATER 2 insisted in issuing one hard copy print job per log, and in the same way it insisted in saving logs as single PDFs. The ‘File –> Export’ menu option also only exports single logs as PDF files, as each PDF is saved with the same name insthe but will end up with the last log being the only file saved.

UPDATE: According to Kari Dickenson from Golden Software on their STRATER blog page “Print Multiple Logs to PDF with Hole ID as filename” dating February 14, 2012, STRATER 3 now is now able to export multiple logs to a single PDF file, i.e. all pages of all logs will go into one PDF. This is great news for the user community. On the other hand I understand that there is still need for the workaround if you need single PDF files and want the borehole name as the file name. Maybe we should ask Kari to put this on the wish list for future releases of STRATER.

Anyway, this is all not a problem if you are coping with five or ten borehole logs. In this case it will take you ten or fifteen minutes to save the single PDFs and rename them according to the borehole IDs and you are done. I had quite a different challenge, as during the UNEP Ogoniland Environmental Assessment our eight drilling teams had drilled some 800 boreholes for soil sampling and another three teams had drilled 180 groundwater monitoring wells.

Now if that would have been all, I would have sorted it in a few hours. But I wanted more: What if we had JPG files of the logs, named accordingly? And what if you wanted to import them into a GIS system, or into Google Earth? But then you would like to see the logs in their correct position, wouldn’t you? Yes, then we need to geo-tag the logs’ JPG files.

So the process was clear:

1. Batch print 980 logs from STRATER 2 as single and separate PDF files,
2. Rename 980 PDF files according to their Borehole ID,
3. Convert 980 PDF files into JPG files,
4. Geo-tag 980 JPG files,
5. Create a KML file for import into Google Earth, showing previews and large images of the 980 logs.

This process was impossible to handle manually for 980 logs. Calculating eight minutes for the manual process, it would have taken more than three weeks of uninterrupted log processing to complete the task.

It took me a few hours to figure out how STRATER handles the batch print, how the PDF printer installed by Adobe Acrobat 9 handles the printing process, and how to find a workaround.

Golden Software say that STRATER is working flawlessly, it is not their problem what the installed printer does with STRATER’s output and batch ‘printing’ of PDF logs does not result in what I and others might need, and I have no reason to doubt that.

Adobe say that their Acrobat 9 installed PDF ‘printer’ is working flawlessly, and that it is not their problem that the software piping data into the printer produces one ‘print’ command for 980 logs but does not manage to change the name of the file 979 times. And I do not doubt that, either.

If you batch print 980 logs consecutively into separate PDF files, and the file name does not change, you will end up with one PDF file showing only the last log, because the same file has been overwritten 979 times if you suppress the overwrite error of the PDF printer. Or a window pops up and wants you to accept the overwrite process or save as new file 979 times. I found both options unacceptable and looked for a PDF printer that was able to save the PDF file produced automatically and with an individual file name.

I ended up testing various products such as CutePDF, FreePDF, dopdf, Bullzip PDF, amongst others. I personally found Bullzip PDF Printer most convenient, as it enables the user to set a flexible file name with a few mouse-clicks, and print hundreds of logs without any further action. FreePDF appears to be as configurable with FreePDF_Multidoc, although I was unable to check this application in depth. Both FreePDF and FreePDF_Multidoc are in German.

Bullzip is in English, and I ended up using it. When I looked last, the license said ‘free for personal and commercial use up to 10 users’.

Bullzip PDF Printer will produce 3-5 logs per minute, and when configured with <date>-<time> in the file name, each STRATER log will be printed separately. You should not configure it to overwrite or append the PDF to existing files if you want to process the PDFs further, e.g. rename them with the borehole ID or convert them to JPG for georeferencing.

Also, the Bullzip options ‘Open destination folder after creation’ and ‘Open document after creation’ should be deactivated, otherwise Bullzip will open one file manager and/or one Acrobat Reader (or Adobe Acrobat Standard) window after creation of each file, which will clutter up your screen if you have to print a few hundred files.

After printing, you will have a folder full of files which are named something like 2011-01-19_16-41-51.pdf, the filename being in YYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm-ss.pdf format. We are already half-way there.

Now to rename 980 PDF files manually is a challenge, and quite boring. I had done that after the first batch run, which took me more than ten hours, and in doing so I noticed that my basic STRATER data were flawed. Mainly because of misspellings of the borehole IDs in the STRATER database, there were about 120 named log sheets without lithology and/or well construction logs, and there were about the same number of unnamed lithology and/or well construction log sheets.

So, check and correct the database, PDF print again, and: think again: rename again??? Yes, rename again, but definitely not by hand this time! I had asked an IT programmer if he were willing to write me a piece of software to extract the borehole ID, but he found it too boring and refused. After some searching on the net I found what I was looking for: A-PDF Rename. A-PDF Rename was an epiphany for me, as it provides exactly what I was looking for: rename a PDF document by a text read from the actual PDF document. In this case: the borehole ID.

The renaming process is as follows:

1. Start A-PDF Rename
2. Go to (1) Add PDF Documents. Add PDF logs by hitting the “Add File” or “Add Folder” button. It may take a while if you have several hundred log files.
3. Go to (2) Rename Method. Hit the “Macro” button –> click “Content Tag! at the bottom of the context menu.
4. The window will show you one of your PDF documents.
5. Find the position of the borehole name.
6. Click it, and from the context menu chose “get content by position” or “get content by keyword”, as applicable to your borehole names. I chose mine by position.
7. Change Tag Name, Position Deviation etc. to your requirements, e.g. “borehole_name”.
8. Hit the “save” button, which returns you to the first window.
9. Hit the “Macro” butto again, and “%Content_borehole_name%” has been added to the bottom of the context menu.
10. Click it, and “%Content_borehole_name%” will be added to the “Rename Filename” slot.
11. Do not (!) select the ‘Modify Metadata’ option, as the metadata are essential for PDF to JPG conversion and JPG geo-tagging.
12. It will be added to the file name, not overwrite it, so you need to delete the “%filename%” bit at the beginning of the line.
13. Go to (3) and chose “Preview” or “Preview and Rename”.
14. Depending on the number of PDF logs you have, you can now get yourself a cup of coffee now, go for lunch, or even go home for the night and return to work next morning.

If you have several hundred PDF files, even renaming with A-PDF Rename may take several hours and depending on processor(s) and RAM also may slow down your computer significantly. In any case, a lot better than manual renaming.

Initially it had taken me a 10-hour day to manually rename (open PDF document, select borehole ID, hit Ctrl-C (copy), Ctrl-W (close PDF document), rename file in file manager, open next file) 1,100 PDF files with Adobe Acrobat 9. A-PDF Rename needs five minutes of batch process configuration, and does the rest by itself. For me, A-PDF Rename achieved a recognition rate of about 98%, so I had to rename a few files manually. I am not sure whether the 2% of unrecognised borehole IDs were caused by the BullZip printing software, or the A-PDF Rename software, or if it was a flaw in my STRATER setup. In any case, the gap between STRATER 2 and 980 neatly named PDF files was now closed by 98%, and I was really happy with the results.

The A-PDF Rename trial version is restricted, if you are going to use the software permanently, make sure you buy a license (27 US$ at the time of writing). A-PDF’s service is very good: I had a slight problem with installing it, and they helped me fix it within two hours. Thank you very much to Alice, and keep up the good work, lasses and lads!

In the end, the whole directory will be full of files that are now named something like 001-002-03.pdf, or whatever the borehole ID is. If your client is happy with named borehole logs in PDF format, compress the folder and send him a mail where he can download it and this is the end of the production chain.

Or is it? Or do we want our client to have some goodies?

How about integrating the odd borehole log in the final project report? We will need images in JPG format to achieve that, as our word processing software does not import PDFs.

Enter IrfanView. I am sure there are more programmes around that do the same as IrfanView does, but I happened to have it on my computer anyway, and I was always happy so never looked again. IrfanView batch converts PDF to JPG if you have the addons installed. When searching for the PDF import format, you will find the PDF file type in the

‘Files –> Open –> Files of Type –> EPS/PS/PDF/AI-PostScript’

menu. When converting JPG, make sure to have a good look at the Options and the Advanced Options. It takes less than five minutes to configure the batch process, and the computer works on several hundred files in a few hours without user intervention.

IrfanView is a really clever piece of software, and it is critical for this process. IrfanView is free as in ‚free beer‘, and in addition Irfan is very quick and competent if you have a question. Good guy, well done! I think it would be really fair to honour his achievement and contribution to this process by paying him the 10 Euros he is asking for professional use. He actually should be selling IrfanView for 100 Euros per license. Yes, it is that good.

If you need to install IrfanView on your computer, make sure you have the 32 bit Ghostscript version installed for Irfanview to use, as IrfanView itself cannot handle 64 bit Ghostscript and comes up with an error message when converting PDF to JPG.

Now the client can put the logs on his web page, in his report, etc.

Our GIS expert had developed a web mapping application for the project, and I was curious enough to get the last step done to upload the logs to the GIS and have them show up in the correct place.

The process of getting the coordinates from a spreadsheet into the EXIF part of the log files JPG images is rather technical, and if you don’t know what EXIF means, the details would bore you into oblivion anyway. Just this much: to achieve the last steps, you will need to install exiftool, GNU Win Tools for MS Windows, and GNU gawk. Thanks to Martin Buitelaar, for turning me in the right direction with exiftool!

The next steps involve entering manual commands with cryptic options on the command line. I managed to condense the command line input into a batch script that handles the whole part from the conversion of PDF files into JPEG to geo-tagging the images and putting them into a Google Earth kml file. The best thing about it is that once started it does not require any manual input or other human intervention, and it can run overnight and unattended.

In the end I reduced a process that would have taken more than 130 person working hours (or more than 16 working days) if done manually, to one printing process, one renaming process, and one computerised overnight batch run, all of this requiring a total of one hour of human attention and maybe 12 hours of computer time, using software for less than 40US$.

You can now find the Howto and script here.

During the whole process, I have learnt a lot about the software, and would like to thank all the software developers involved. You all did a brilliant job, without your work this would not have been possible. I am a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.