We proudly present the major release 3.0. It's a milestone in the history of PDFCreator. Being the very first accessible application for PDF conversion, PDFCreator is assisting you for more than 15 years now. There were lots of improvements under the hood and new helpful features were added. After maintaining and improving the application for many years, we think now is the right time to also provide a new modern and more accessible User Interface (UI).
The redesign process has been quite some work and we believe that most of our users will like it. In this post we briefly showcase the innovations.
Logo
The first essential change is that the official PDFCreator logo has been modified. This is a big step since the logo is well-known all over the world. That's why we did not fully discard the logo - the typical PDFCreator flame keeps being integrated. Nonetheless, the new logo shows even better that PDFCreator is made for digital documents.
Another benefit is that now it's easier to distinguish between the different PDFCreator editions. The related version is clearly outlined by being labeled right aside the logo. By the way, the new logo is the result of an official design competition.
UX
The outstanding innovation of PDFCreator 3.0 is a better User Experience: The user interface as a whole has been designed with the intention that the user can reach the desired result in as few steps as possible.
Both the private end user and the professional business user can easily perform the relevant steps they specifically want to take in order to perform the conversion process - regardless of whether this is a simple conversion or an automatic workflow including profound settings.
New Navigation
The Home screen has got a completely new interface. We improved the structure and re-arranged tabs with the objective to ensure a user-friendly interaction and help you to get started as quickly as possible.
To more experienced users it may sound strange, but a common question was: I have installed PDFCreator, what should I do now? Simply Drag and Drop any file onto the Home screen will quickly start the conversion process. By the way: The preferred way is to print to the PDFCreator printer from any application that is capable of printing.
Where in the past the devision in "Application Settings" and "Profile Settings" might have been confusing for some users, now there is a clear horizontal navigation bar which is composed of the most important options such as Home, Profiles, Printers, Accounts as well as Application Settings and Help.
We wanted to bring the settings that might to be changed regularly to your attention. We have also realized, that many users did not know about a lot of features that existed. Most features are placed more prominent. The settings button now only contains settings, that you seldom or hopefully never have to access (i.e. language, debug settings etc.).
Profile Settings
The Profile section is designed to define specific settings as a profile. The settings are now grouped by meaning (i.e. Convert, Modify, Send) to be aligned with the way PDFCreator is processing the document. The settings of the former „Actions“ tab are integrated there as well. The new arrangement allows the user to make the desired settings in the most useful and logical order. For example Auto-Save and interactive conversion are now defined as first thing when configuring a profile, as they define the behaviour of the whole profile. Settings that exclude each other are hidden or disabled.
Accounts
The main navigation includes a new Accounts option. It's the central place for accounts (SMTP, Dropbox, FTP, HTTP, Time Server). Once an account is configured it is available for all workflows. Retyping account information somewhere else is not necessary anymore. This is very helpful for users who regularly use automation and multiple printers. But you do not have to configure the accounts here. If you are configuring a profile and i.e. want to add a Dropbox upload, you can add the account directly from the profile.
All in all, the new structure guides the user in an intuitive manner to make the settings. Important options are presented more clearly. The new interface now comes with large areas, icons and buttons indicating that something can happen at these points.
If you have any suggestions in regards to the usability we invite you to submit your feedback. Please participate in our PDFCreator Redesign survey.
More Improvements of PDFCreator 3.0:
- The merge window has been redesigned to provide more information on the documents in the queue.
- The title replacements are now easier to configure. The logic also has slightly changed, as most users just used it to remove things from the print document titles. If you want to actually replace it with another value, you have to use regular expressions now.
- Wherever Tokens are supported, there is a token button now to give access to the tokens available
- A new send action has been added to send the converted files via HTTP to a web hook
- Triple-clicking a text box will now select the whole text, even if it contains multiple words.
- The defaults for the settings were reconsidered. We now use the strongest available encryption for PDF files by default and also have reasonable security settings. When a PDF is protected, the default is now to allow to open and print the document, but not to allow any modification.
- PDFCreator 3.0 is available in 29 languages now. We would like to take the opportunity to thank all translators and to welcome the new translations Estonian, Hungarian and Romanian.