You pdfforge guys are providing the outstanding PDFCreator now for a couple of years. On Windows there are many, many competitors, but as far as I could see nothing compares with PDFCreator, whether they are for free or commercial products.
Now you have started providing the new PDFArchitect. Maybe it is in its early days, with limited functionality and not yet stable.
But may I ask why you are making this effort? As mentioned several times at the pdfforge forum PDFsam is a great tool in that area. To me it seems functionally complete, i.e. it can do everything you might want in merging, splitting and massaging PDF files, whereas the current PDFArchitect is very limited.
There may be one weakness with PDFsam. At the very first time using it, it looks confusing, not intuitive. (It shows an Open button near to the upper left corner but you can't use it to open a PDF file that you want to change. It shows kind of navigation tree with several plugins while you aren't assuming that you would be using plugins for a basic PDF file manipulation. But in fact you need to go to one of those "plugins" or you wouldn't be able to do anything, not even open a PDF source file. Actually they are not plugins.) The whole UX concept of PDFsam, buttons, icons, the whole skin could be renovated. Compared to PDFsam PDFArchitect is more intuitive from day one on. But that is also easier for a product offering only a small fraction of the functionality of the other mature product.
What is the intent with PDFArchitect which seems to be redundant? If there are reasons why a PDF massaging tool should come integrated with PDFCreator, would it be an option to integrate PDFCreator and PDFsam or even merge the projects or let them be co-operating?
My comment is not so detailed or functional as pps. The limitations pps cites induce me to ask why PDFArchitect is even included in the latest edition (1.3.2) of PDFCreator. For every doc I print to a PDF with Creator, I get a delayed and unneccesary opening of Architect. As far as I can tell, the one and only function of Architect is to delete selected pages from the newly created file. That is superfluous since I could have printed pages 1, 2, 5, 7, 10 from the original in order to get the trimmed PDF of my desire.
Can I somehow delete the installation of Architect so that I do not get bothered by its unintended opening after every use of Creator? I do not dare eliminate its folder unless I know it will not disable the wonderful Creator. Architect is a nuisance.
You can simply uncheck the checkbox that states "Edit PDF files with PDFArchitect" in the PDFCreators printing dialog. Also, if you run the PDFCreator setup with the parameter /expert, you can choose not to install PDFArchitect.
I would also like to add that the PDFArchitect is still under development and is in a very early stage, it is included so users may have a look at it and state their wishes and report problems it still has. But you can actually merge PDFs and arrange the page order, which are two regularly requested features.
I like the concept of PDFArchitect and find it easier to use than PDFsam. Just because something already exists does not mean we can't try to improve on it.
PDFArchitect does still need a lot of work though. My biggest problem is the slow page rendering and that it always goes back to page 1 after deleting a page. At the current speed it's not really useable yet.
Other features missing are
1. the ability to insert a blank page
2. the ability to merge documents
3. the ability to export (save) partial pages to PDF without printing to PDFCreator
4. allow to magnify preview pane
5. ability to import multiple PDF into a single document
6. file view and page view
7. faster page rendering.
8. Maybe look at the now defunct "PDF page organizer" by Foxit to get ideas.
I totally agree that PDFArchitect needs a lot of work yet.
Merging documents is possible though. And "ability to import multiple PDF into a single document" sounds quite the same to me, or do you mean something different?
The overall speed surely need to be improved. The current state is quite early work, but we'll see to it that we'll improve it with the time.
I wanted to combine two separate .pdf files and came upon this page. I see two answer from separate people at pdfforge that you can, but they did not say how.
Once you find it, it is incredably easy. Under the Extras there is a Merge documents, where it takes two or more files that have been already openend in the program and creates a new merged doc, easy. My only comment it did not seem intuative to go to the extras. Once you know its a breeze. I have since found that once you have multiple documents open the right most tool icon with the plus brings up the merge option.
