PDFCreator 2.2.0 released

PDFCreator Plus for Business can now be configured with (fully managed) group policies. This is a first version of what we are planning and does not allow full control over every single set-ting. Instead, we have added policies to modify certain areas. Admins can now disable individual settings tabs in the application settings (Debug, Printers, Title) to prevent users from changing settings there. You can also disable access to the application settings completely.

In the profile settings, you can disable the profile management (adding, deleting and renaming profiles).

As for individual setttings, we allow to set the application language and the update interval right now, we are the most requested settings at the moment.

On top, some informational screens can be disabled as well, like the welcome screen after installation and the information on PDF Architect. As the group policies are fully managed, they will not change the user‘s registry settings. While a policy is set, certain settings will not be available to the user and hint is displayed, that the setting is defined by the admin. When the policy is released again, the original value will be in place again.

You can find a full guide to what is possible here

For the future, we are thinking of ways to provide more functionality here as well, i.e. on how to predefine full profiles. If you have any suggestions on what you would like to see here, let us know in the comments.

The logic of the E-Mail button in the print job window was changed. It has been requested for a long time and now it is possible to create a mail from your print job without having to select a location on the hard drive.

The output files are now stored in a temporary location and attached to the mail client. When PDFCreator closes, it will look into that temporary folder and remove files that are older than one day.

This process is required, because PDFCreator does not know when you actually send the mail. This can take a few moments and if PDFCreator deletes the files before they are sent, you will run into trouble.

Along with the Release of PDFCreator 2.2.0, we have also published PDF Architect 4, the next version of our full-featured PDF editor.

The new PDF Architect loads faster than ever and the new hibernate mode will not fully shut down PDF Architect when closing the application, but will leave a small process running. As a result, PDF Architect will open instantly afterwards. And if you don‘t like it, you can disable it in the settings.

The new side-by-side view allows you to put two documents next to each other and scroll through the synchronously, to look for things that have changed. Of course, there still is the automatic document comparison tool.

The redaction features allow to either erase content from the document (whiteout) or replace the content (blackout) securely. The content will be replaced completely instead of placing a black bar on top of the content. This bar could be easily remove (i.e. with PDF Architect). The replacement solution makes it perfect for confidential informa-tion.

On top of the redaction, PDF Architect also comes with more professional grade features like export to different PDF/A formats (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 2u, 3u) and cloud synchronization for the most popular could file storages Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box.com and Evernote.

You can find all new features here

After many tests, the COM interface now is no lon-ger marked as "Beta". We have changed the PDFCreatorBeta object names to PDFCreator. From now on, we will use strict versioning in the COM interface that will allow applications being linked to a certain COM interface version to run even if we change things.

Apart from that, the COM interface now contains methods to clear the print queue and to query metadata from a print job (i.e. title, computer name or printer). This helps in deciding what to do with the incoming print jobs.

When you work on a project for years, things tend to evolve over time and sometimes you need to finish something quickly or wrench a feature into an architecture that was not designed for that.

We at pdfforge love good code and hate to integrate ugly solutions, but still this happens from time to time. During this release, we have refactored many sections in our code.

This started with making the code base fit for building PDFCreator Server on top of that, but even after this was completed, we reworked many things towards a better design and improved testability.

And to make sure features remain working over the time, we have added a lot of unit and integration tests that are run each time we commit something to our git server.

PDFCreator now comes with 19 Translations. While we always try to serve as many people in their native language as possible, we have also added more checks to raise the quality of the translations. In different places, PDFCreator needs to tell the things that you can‘t translate upfront, i.e. „There are 5 print jobs waiting“.

The number 5 would obviously change most of the times this is displayed, so we are using a placeholder in the messages, i.e. „There are {0} print jobs waiting“, where „{0} will be replaced with the actual number.

In the past, we have sometimes seens translations where these placeholders were not inserted properly and were not replaced. The result could have been something like „There are (0) print jobs waiting“ (note the round brackets instead of the curly ones). While we can‘t actually check how good the translations are, we have now automated to check if these placeholders are present and can be replaced corretly.

If you should not find your translation in PDFCreator and would like to help, you can sign up at our translation site and apply for your language:
http://translate.pdfforge.org/

We had a few problems with the different versions of Ghostscript we have been using over the time. There have been problems that existed in single versions and we had a hard time to find a version that actually is stable.

Eventually we ended with Ghostscript 9.10 which did not contain the most urgent problems our users had, except for one problem with the metadata in PDF/A files. We have backported a patch that fixes this and now ship a modified version of Ghostscript 9.10.

As we are talking about bugs, we are not free of fail of course. We have fixed several issued our users have reported over the last months. Among them, there are some uncaught exceptions that could lead to an error message window. They are handled properly now.

Not strictly a bug, but rather a limitation we have worked around now is that PDFCreator was not able the convert jobs merged from many (> 300) individual jobs.

The reason is that the amount of space we can occupy on a command line is rather limited and therefore we exceeded the allowed space (32767 characters).

Ghostscript supports to read the parameters from a file instead, so we now support the conversion of much larger print jobs (tested with 3000 print jobs merged into one).