Filling eight certificate blocks in one click on VB-G RAM G

The Work Entry page on VB-G RAM G asks for eight certificates. Not eight different sets of details — the same signing authority, eight times over. Name, designation, department, mobile, email, typed into block one, then block two, then block three, all the way to eight. Each block also wants a PDF attached. And the server rejects anything much over 1 MB, which is smaller than most scans come out of a scanner.

So the real task is not filling a form. It is filling the same form eight times and then fighting a size limit eight times.

Where the time actually goes

Break down one work entry and the shape of the problem is clear:

• Forty fields of repetition. Five details across eight blocks, identical every time, retyped for every work entry you process.
• Eight attachments to match up. Each PDF has to land in the right block. Get one wrong and the record is wrong in a way nobody notices until an audit.
• The size cap. A scanned certificate is routinely two or three megabytes. The server wants roughly one. So each oversized file goes out to a compressor, comes back, gets re-attached.
• Two dropdowns. DPR and Convergence, set the same way each time.

Every step is trivial. The cost is that there are so many of them, and that the interesting failure — a PDF in the wrong block — looks exactly like success.

How the add-on works

It is a Chrome and Edge extension that acts on the Work Entry page. You set the signing-authority details once in its settings, and they are remembered across browser restarts and across updates of the add-on itself.

From then on, one click:

• Fills name, designation, department, mobile and email into all eight blocks.
• Matches each PDF to its block by the number 1–8 in the file name, so 3.pdf goes to block three. The mapping is explicit rather than positional, which is what makes it auditable.
• Sets DPR and Convergence to Yes.
• Compresses any scan over the server's limit.

Compressing PDFs without a server

This is the part worth explaining, because the obvious implementation is the wrong one.

The easy way to compress a PDF is to send it somewhere that will do it for you. That is also unacceptable here: these are signed certificates with named officials on them, and uploading them to a third-party service to save a few hundred kilobytes is not a trade worth making.

So the compression happens on your own machine, inside the browser, using pdf.js to read the document and jsPDF to write a smaller one. Nothing is uploaded anywhere except to the portal itself, which was always going to receive it.

And when a file still cannot be made to fit, the add-on blocks the fill rather than proceeding. That choice is deliberate: a partial submission that looks complete is worse than a stop with a clear reason. You would rather be told which file is the problem than discover later that block six went up empty.

Installing it

It loads as an unpacked extension, which is the standard route for a tool distributed outside the Chrome Web Store:

1. Download and unzip the latest release to a permanent folder — Chrome loads it from that path every launch, so a temporary folder will break it later.
2. Open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, and choose Load unpacked.
3. Select the unzipped folder.
4. Open the add-on's settings and enter the signing-authority details once.

There is an illustrated install-and-use guide on the project page for anyone who has not side-loaded an extension before.

Limitations worth knowing

• Chrome and Edge only. It uses the Chromium extension APIs; there is no Firefox build.
• File names carry the mapping. Each PDF needs its block number 1–8 in the name. Rename before you start and the rest follows.
• Compression has a floor. A very dense colour scan may not reach the limit at readable quality. The add-on tells you instead of guessing.
• Same details in every block. That is the case it was built for. Eight genuinely different signing authorities is not what it does.
• Tied to the current page. It targets work_entry.aspx as it exists today; a portal redesign will require an update.
• Developer mode nag. Chrome will periodically warn about unpacked extensions. That is Chrome's policy for anything not distributed through its store.

The design rule underneath

Everything runs locally. No data leaves the PC — not the authority details, not the certificates, not the compressed output. For a tool handling signed government documents that is not a feature to advertise so much as the baseline for the tool being acceptable at all.

Certificate Auto-Fill on GitHub · Project page and install guide