PDFCreator 4.1 is out

For the new version of PDFCreator our mission was to make converting PDFs even smoother and more efficient for you. PDFCreator 4.1 contains new features that will help to prevent unnecessary distractions during your workflow and it also introduces the possibility to add watermarks to your PDFs. 

PDFCreator 4.1 includes several new features and improvements that will help to make converting your PDFs more hassle-free. We want you to be able to fully focus on your work. In the past, some of you were facing issues with not receiving e-mails from our license server about an impending license expiration. Understandably, this brought up a lot of frustration. In order to avoid any surprises and distractions like that we have now implemented a feature that gives you the possibility to activate a reminder in the application itself. This reminder will inform you reliably when it is time for a license renewal.

Another feature that will make working with our PDF converter more efficient and optimize your workflow is the possibility to add additional attachments to e-mails sent with PDFCreator. So no need to send that extra e-mail and simply skip one step of your workflow.

You can skip yet another step of your workflow with the help of a new action that forwards the print job to another profile. By this you can convert to additional formats and multiply actions. This means that you print once, but there will be two or more conversions in two different profiles. By this you can, for example, save a document as a picture and as a PDF at the same time - or you save a PDF/A file locally and send an encrypted PDF by e-mail.

PDFCreator 4.1 introduces the possibility to add watermarks to your PDF files and thus yet another level of security for your PDF documents. It works in a similar way to adding a background, which you may already be familiar with from working with PDFCreator. Depending on how many pages your watermark file consists of, you select the type of repetition for the pages. This means, if your first page has a different layout than the rest of the pages, the first watermark pages will be set, while the last one will be repeated until the end of the document. The opacity of the watermark is variable. Of course the watermark feature can be added as an action in the workflow editor, which means you can automate it according to your requirements. 

Improvements

• PDFCreator Professional and Terminal Server: This release introduces a new action to forward the print job to another profile - e.g. to convert to additional formats or multiply actions.
• In addition to backgrounds, it is now possible to add watermarks - both with variable opacity.
• When adding a background or watermark, the original size can be kept by disabling fit to page.
• E-mails sent with PDFCreator can now have additional attachments.
• Uploading to a FTP server is now possible via SFTP.
• There is a new command line parameter which installs missing printers to sync settings and printers.
• PDFCreator Professional and Terminal Server: The user is informed about an impending license expiration and can activate a reminder.
• PDFCreator Professional and Terminal Server: It is now possible to deactivate the workflow overview via the group policy management.

Bugs fixed

• PDFCreator Professional, PDFCreator Terminal Server: Under certain conditions, entering the license key in the setup could result in a crash or close the setup screen immediately.
• The print action was not working.
• Under certain conditions uploading files via FTP to an empty folder could fail.
• A desktop shortcut was created even though it was deselected during the setup.
• Downloading an update was occasionally giving an error.

Other Changes

• In 2021 we will drop official support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. We do not prohibit the installation and it is very likely it will continue to work, but the releases will not be tested under these operating systems.
• The new setup (that we introduced with PDFCreator 4.0.0) now supports commmand line parameters. Please give us feedback, if you require any other parameter from our legacy setup.
• The COM examples were updated and improved.