PDFCreator Server 2.0 brings a completely redesigned user interface. The main focus was to make it much easier to find functionality and to make configuring the application as easy as possible. A few larger features were added, i.e. the live monitoring and the C# script action, but we also made a lot of other improvements.
User Interface
The user interface has been completely redesigned to make it as good looking and accessible as possible. The look-and-feel as well as the technical platform equals the other PDFCreator editions so the whole PDFCreator family has a uniform basis. (example screenshot of UI showing one of the following improvements)
UX
To enhance the user experience we added a couple of new things:
- PDFCreator Server now includes Live Monitoring to see the status of the print jobs and monitor activity on threads to spot unusual activities early and easy.
- Users get a notification if the PDFCreator Service could not be started or stopped.
- The history view has been updated: from now on, the last search options in server history will be saved.
- If a new version is available, an update-info will be shown.
- Also, we added assistance to initially configure PDFCreator Server: When creating a queue, users can select the output directory and a printer with the same name is created automatically. The queue then is fully functional and ready to use without the need to set up printer names separately.
C# Scripts
Great news: With the new C# Scripting it's now possible to integrate with other scripts. The C# script is a custom script action you can write in C# to work with print job data directly before and after the conversion based on CS-Script. The actions have full access to the print job data and all functionality available in C#.
Performance
Optimized performance: PDFCreator Server creates one printer port per printer to allow Windows to spool to these printers simultaneously and increase the printing performance.
More improvements of PDFCreator Server 2.0:
- During the uninstallation, the license activation will be released again to allow installation on a different machine
- PDF/A-1b and PDF/A-2b files can be optionally validated during the conversion. A validation report will be saved next to the PDF file.
- When loading settings from INI files, PDFCreator Server can now optionally add missing printers
- Print jobs logs are now collected in a single event log entry instead of having one entry per log line
- Select between multiple separators for User Tokens in documents to avoid conflicts with other markup characters
- PDFCreator Server now asks to collect anonymous usage statistics to improve the further development. This is privacy compliant and completely optional. Users will be informed transparently when the application is started for the first time.
- 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.
As PDFCreator Server 2.0 is based on PDFCreator 3.2, this brings also the following improvements:
- Tokens for cover, background and attachment
- Tokens are now available in the PDF signature fields Reason, Location and Contact
- Detect too long paths, invalid characters and invalid absolute paths in profile settings
- Display creation date in file history overview
- User tokens in text fields now are shown in the preview with temporary values
- The SMTP action now supports CC and BCC fields as well
- New action to send output over HTTP
- Updated Ghostscript from 9.19 to 9.22
- Triple-clicking a text box will now select the whole text, even if it contains multiple words
Breaking changes
PDFCreator Server 2.0 requires at least the .Net Framework 4.5.1 and therefore does not support Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 anymore