One place I run PDFcreator is on an EEG (=electroencephalography) reader station that his Nihon-Kohden software loaded. Granted, N-K has never been known to be careful in not hogging resources. E.g. they only recently realized that users might want to minimize the N-K window to get to other applications running concurrently. And even then it does not always work as expected.
That's the background. Specifically, I'm creating a report, ultimately in PDF format. The inputs into PDFcreator include selected pages of EEG waves followed by a Word document which is then moved to the top of the stack before the PDF is created. Thus, I have to use "Wait - Collect" after the first page I "print". I then click back on the EEG reader window, or the Word window, to proceed with review or report editing.
Here is the problem. On some occasions, and I have yet to discern a pattern, the PDFcreator window -- the one listing the various items "printed" -- disappears. It's not on the desktop. There is nothing on the "Start" bar. Yet, a 3-finger salute to bring up Task Manager shows that it's still running. If I then use the "Switch To" button within Task Manager, sure enough, the PDFcreator window pops up, and it becomes visible on the Start bar as well. Nothing is lost, every "print" job I ran is listed. Yet, PDFcreator was hidden for a while.
Anyone know why?
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Potential enhancements to consider:
1 - moving pages around not by date/time printed + application name creating it, but by seeing a preview of that item in a side window. (I.e., similarly to how one would change the order of slides in PowerPoint or Impress.)
2 - overprinting text when consolidating the individual items into a single PDF. Examples include (a) page numbers (that would be meaningful in the context of the document as a whole, but not necessarily when looking at the compnent parts); moreover, many images when printed out (as in the EEG that I mention above) provide no mechanism for adding a pager number at the time of printout (b) some other text specific to the individual component. In the EEG example above, one EEG image printout could be "Figure 1", the next one, possibly requiring more than 1 page, might be "Figure 2", and so forth. This can get horribly complicated, of course. The simplest would be to have some provision for a "Page of ", as a minimum, so that incomplete document delivery/printout would be clearly visible should it occur.