RediDraft Document Automation
Blog
RediDraft Exists Today Because Twenty Years Ago FastDraft Users Never Quit Using it.
When Valeo Software, LLC closed its doors in 2004 everyone involved thought the existing FastDraft users would move to something else. They knew it wouldn't happen overnight but were convinced it would happen. Tim Owensby put together a plan he thought would keep the...
Planning for the RediDraft 2024 Release
RediDraft 2024 has been in development for over a year and is expected to be made generally available in the first quarter of 2024. The development effort for this upcoming release is internally funded. Planning for this release is a little bit of a challenge because...
Competition
One of my earliest conversations with Jan DeSalvo about FastDraft was about competition. She talked about the applications she thought FastDraft directly competed with and why. She was very passionate about how FastDraft was better than any known competition in every...
Content Organization and Management
From the very start RediDraft, like FastDraft before it, helps you organize your content to maximize reuse and ease of maintenance over time. There aren't any templates like you find in other systems. The highest level of organization is the library. The RediDraft...
RediDraft 2024 Server Side Technology Stack
When I started to research available options for this next release decided to go with NodeJS on the server side over the Microsoft .NET stack and PHP. There are always tradeoffs with any technology choice and while I had some valid concerns about the security and...
Eighty Percent of Document Assembly is Trivially Easy
The basic premise behind all document assembly of any kind is you have some combination of boiler plate content and some combination of variable data that customizes that boiler plate content. Even in their earliest days almost all word processors supported some form...
Aggregate Variables
FastDraft and RediDraft supported the following variable types: Text (could be a gender variable) Multiple Choice (could be a gender variable) Numeric Calculation Date With the 2024 release of RediDraft a new variable type is introduced. Aggregate Think of an...
Gender Variables and Pronouns
Nothing in this discussion should be taken in any way as an endorsement or repudiation of the current social and political debates around gender. This post simply describes how FastDraft and RediDraft handled gender variables and pronoun resolution when drafting a...
Variables
The late Jan DeSalvo, God rest her soul, referred to FastDraft's variables as "powerful variables." It was and still is an accurate description. Variables in FastDraft were central to the drafting experience. They weren't used for simple text replacement in the form...
Microsoft Word Add In
The user's word processor of choice was used to manage form volumes in FastDraft. To improve the user experience FastDraft needed a way to let the user define a new component for example and then have FastDraft insert it in the correct place in the current document....
Subscribe & Follow
Join Our Newsletter
If you are a current or former RediDraft user or you used FastDraft from Interactive Professional Software (later Valeo Software LLC) sign up to follow along as we design and release the next version of RediDraft.