litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/05/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. TextPipe is a text transformation, conversion, cleansing and extraction tool. Are there any other applications like it?

A.

• General areas of open-source software are Perl, Sprog, Jitterbit;
• Learn about ETL and Munging;
• Linux utilities include grep, awk, gawk, sed;
• For Microsoft Windows, there are both free, open source versions (Cygwin) and commercial versions (MKS Toolkit).

Q. An Acrobat plug-in for applying a trial exhibit sticker to the first page of various documents in PDF format? More specifically, a stamp that is a replica of a "tabbie sticker" that can be edited with multiple lines of text? An example would be a stamp that contained something like the following:

Plaintiff's Trial Exhibit

PTX 0001

C.A. No. 00-000 (ABC)

A.

• Scan a sheet of blank Tabbies & then opened the file & select one sticker with the border. You can then copy that image to use as a stamp. Place the "stamp" on the page of the exhibit & resize. You can use the typewriter function to enter whatever text you want;
• Use Visionary, which is free. You can change the colors of the label - yellow for plaintiffs, and blue for defendants. There are 3 lines for the case number, exhibit number and title. The stamp can be moved on the page. You can then print the page with the color exhibit stamp;
• IntelliBates (Acrobat plug-in) is fine but time-consuming (and there is no option for a border of an exhibit sticker).

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.