PDFs are alterable and therefore not suitable for records retention as the requirement is to be in the most unalterable format.  This drives the need to have documents stored as TIFF documents.  If users must place documents in Laserfiche manually, that defeats the purpose of Forms.  Attachments should be able to be merged into the main form asone document - either at the time the form is created and finalized, or via a Workflow process.  Currently, the last I heard, there is no process in WF that allows you to convert documents from PDFs to TIFFS - which would also be a wonderful feature.

Hi Robert, 

While Forms can save copies of the form itself as either TIFF or PDF, it does not currently feature file conversion capabilities.  That might be something you could implement as a custom activity in Workflow, or else you could require a user to generate pages manually in the Client after form submission.  

If you've got a compelling use case for needing PDF to TIFF conversion functionality for attachments, we'd be very interested in hearing it.  Automated page generation is a planned feature for future versions of the Laserfiche suite, and hearing more about how users hope to use it would be very helpful for our development team in determining how to prioritize and implement that feature.

Here is how we do it:

• Save to Repository Service Task (form as TIFF, attachment is PDF)
• Use uniquely identified names such as "{vendor name}-{vendor id} {invoice number} Form" and "{vendor name}-{vendor id} {invoice number} Attachment"
• the user specified in the repository profile, when logged into the LF client, has Generate Laserfiche Pages checked under Tools->Options->New Documents->Settings
• Create a Workflow Service Task that does the following:  
  • Retrieve Business Process Variables for {vendor name}, {vendor id}, {invoice number}
  • Search Repository for the Form entry
  • Search Repository for the Attachment entry, which has pages generated for the PDF from the Save to Repository task
  • Move Pages so that the Attachment entry has all its Laserfiche pages moved to the Forms entry
  • There will still be a pdf entry after that, so delete the Attachment entry if you don't want it hanging around
• The result is a single entry where the forms and the pdf are merged and all are Laserfiche pages (tiff)

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the information about your use case.  I'll be sure to pass that info along to the development team!

As a workaround in the meantime, I've got a suggestion.  I see that you've got access to Quick Fields Agent, which has the ability to run Quick Fields sessions on a schedule. And Quick Fields has the ability to convert PDFs to TIFFs.  You might want to consider scheduling a a Quick Fields session that runs once an hour (for example) and converts all newly received PDFs into TIFFs, and then use Workflow to append those newly created TIFF documents to the original form.  If you create a tag called something like "Needs Conversion" and apply it to all new PDF attachments, you could very easily create a Quick Fields session that processes only documents with that tag, and puts them back in the same place, only without the tag anymore.  Your workflow could also be scheduled, or could be triggered automatically whenever a PDF is converted to TIFF.

We would also like to have this option. We're bringing in our purchase orders with attached quotes and the attached quotes are usually PDFs. The Laserfiche PDF document viewer doesn't seem to have the same annotation functionality as the TIFF viewer which makes it desirable to have the form attachments automatically inserted into Laserfiche as TIFFs. It is also desirable to annotate TIFFs because, as mentioned by Robert, this assists in Records Management. TIFF documents maintain the integrity of the original record as TIFF annotations allow us to add annotations on top of the document. Annotating a PDF document using a native PDF program alters the document and it doesn't maintain its integrity as a record.

We're trying to get more of our documents into Laserfiche in TIFF format because of the benefits outlined in the attached Laserfiche article and adding this functionality for Forms attachments would save the trouble of trying to figure out how to  get workflow to accurately convert documents. Additionally, although we assign metadata to documents and attachments coming into the repository through Forms, I don't know how to apply tags so the workaround (as described) doesn't work for us.