Working with rules

A rule is a set of one or more conditions. You can apply the conditions specified by a rule to place markup, extract data, or specify media and finishing options. You can also include a rule as a condition within another rule.

For example, you can use a rule to:

  • Place a barcode on the first page of each document in your PDF file
  • Extract a customer’s name when the city in the mailing address is New York
  • Specify gold media for the first page of each document for a Gold Club member

Each condition in a rule compares two values. The first value can be a Predefined Rule (a rule defined by RICOH ProcessDirector Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat that specifies pages within documents), a Custom Rule (a rule that you have defined), a conditional trigger, a job property, a document property, or a statistic. The choices for the second value depend on the first value.

When you create a rule with multiple conditions, you can specify whether the rule requires all conditions to be met or any condition to be met.

Rules can evaluate static and dynamic values. For example, a rule can evaluate whether the total number of documents in a job is greater than 10. A rule can also evaluate whether the value of the Doc.Begin.Balance document property is equal to the value of the Doc.End.Balance document property.

The Figure below shows a rule with five different types of conditions.

Rule with multiple conditions

Rule Builder dialog showing a rule with multiple conditions

In this section:

  1. Pre-defined rules
    RICOH ProcessDirector Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat has 11 pre-defined rules that apply markup to, set media and finishing options for, or extract data from specific pages within each document in a PDF file. For example, you can use a pre-defined rule to place an image on all front pages in each document.
  2. Conditional triggers
    A conditional trigger is text that determines whether a condition is met.
  3. Using job properties or document properties in rules
    You can compare a job property or document property to a static value, such as a number or word, or to a dynamic value, such as job property, document property or statistic.
  4. Using statistics in rules
    You can compare a statistic to a static value, such as a number or word, or to a dynamic value, such as a job property, document property, or statistic.
  5. Defining a rule
    You can define rules that specify conditions for markup. You can also define rules to set media and finishing options, or to extract data.
  6. Defining a conditional trigger
    You can define text in a PDF file as a trigger to control whether markup is applied to a page when RICOH ProcessDirector processes a PDF file. The text can also control whether media and finishing options are applied to a page and whether document properties are extracted from a page.
  7. Managing rules
    The Rules Manager dialog shows information about your rules. You can define new rules, and edit or delete existing rules.

Related information:

Conditional processing
Working with page inserts
Parent topic: Using RICOH ProcessDirector Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat