As you may know, we have been talking for quite a while about a complete
rewrite of PDFCreator. As I have started the project in 2002, it was
just before my studies in computer science began. The programming
language that was at hand was Visual Basic 6, so I started putting a few
things together with that.
Since then, a lot has happend. A lot
of features went into PDFCreator, a lot of knowledge and experience came
to us and Visual Basic has been deprecated in favour of the .Net
framework. As the current code is very hard to maintain, test and
extend, we are thinking about a complete rewrite for quite a few years
now.
Last July, we have started intense work on that. Now the
time has come, that we would like to have the community take a part in
the development by testing the current state and giving a feedback on
problems, bugs and the new user experience.
There are a few points to consider:
This is a very early version, so you should use it only in a testing environment.
The
release also is not feature-complete. Currently, it’s not possible to
look at the list of pending print jobs in PDFCreator or to combine them.
There is no server mode or a COM interface.
There is also no manual so far.
Currently, there is only the offline package containing PDF Architect in the download as well
Finally,
the settings of the old PDFCreator will not be imported, as they have a
different structure. Most likely we will write import functionality
that will preserve most of the settings later.
So please take
it for what it is: an early developer preview. Having that in mind, we
are very curious to hear your feedback on the current state.
Due
to the early state, things may change significantly in the user
interface, so please do not start translating the application yet. We
would like to wait a while for the whole translation to stabilize,
because some changes could leave your translation unusable.
Just tested on the developer preview version. It works great without any problems we used to occurred on the file/folder (auto saving) name for the Chinese characters (both traditional and simplified). Very good job and thanks a lot !
This is an interesting development, but a couple questions:
Will the COM interface be part of the final, production PDFCreator (hopefully, yes) ?
Will the project remain open-source and if so which language will replace VB6 ? I recall looking at the VB code (from many years ago) for a project at that time and it was well done.
IAC, one of my PCs will be running the new code in the next few days. Regards…
I am sorry for not looking into the thread for the last days, we had some holidays here in Germany.
Regarding the questions:
It is good to know that problems with Chinese charactes are solved. In the old PDFCreator, the problem was Ghostscript which could not handle unicode filenames. In the new version, we are always writing the output to a file called output.pdf and move the file afterwards with the proper name. Thus, we can handle Chinese characters even though Ghostscript can’t.
We are planning to create a MSI file. We are actually working on that again, but it is a lot of work and most likely it will be available through a subscription model and not for free.
The COM interface will be part of the final version. We think that this is a really exciting thing about PDFCreator and gives a lot of possibilities for users and developers.
Finally, PDFCreator will remain open-source. The old VB6 source code just got too hard to maintain and we are now rebuilding everything in C#.
Please let us know if you find any problems. It would also be helpful if you could provide us with some information on the Windows version you are using.
@mphil5330: We were discussing this here in the team and were wondering if the encoding type made a difference for the users. Currently, we have plenty of different fax encodings and regular users will not know which one to use. Therefore, we have currently hard-coded G4 as encoding. This is rather easy to extend in future, but in order to keep the number of options low, we would like to avoid that unless there is a real advantage off that. Why were you specifically asking for G4 enconding?
@Hanske24: I have not been able to download the doc file, word says that it is damaged. Can you upload the files zipped?
@philip: The system I use to store documents recommends multipage TIF’s in Group 4. And Microsoft Office Document Imaging has an excellent OCR feature for searching TIF’s.
Could you make it possible to install the test version in addition to the normal version, e.g. create an additional printer queue PDFCreatorX? This would make testing easier for me.
Do you plan to continue svg support. I notice that it is missing in 1.9. At least the build I tried. While it had some issues in earlier versions I had found it useful.
@joehtg: This is not very easy, because they share the same printer drivers and they depend on only having one application that consumes their data.
@heidx: The svg-support in Ghostscript has been deprecated and it only produces avg files that have an image of the page embedded, which is not too useful for anything. This is why we have removed this for 1.9, together with other formats that basically did the same. We think that if people want to put an image into a svg or psd file, they can do so with the tools they have and most of them will also want to customize positioning etc. So this is extra options to choose from without bringing a real benefit.
If there is an actual demad for things we have excluded in the new version (except the point mentioned above that will be added again), we are willing to add them as well. We are just trying to make PDFCreator easier o understand for new users.
Temp files in spool directory are not being deleted.
I’m running Windows 8 with version 1.9.0.126. I was watching spool directory because I hadn’t figured out yet how the paper size parameter was to be changed. Finely reread a post and figured it out, but also noticed that all of the test runs were staying in the spool directory. The file generated by “Print test Page” gets deleted but an actual PDF created by MS Word 2007 does not. Made runs with the output parameter PDF, PDF/A, and PDF/X. All runs left the .ps file.
2013-06-23 12:49:45.3278 [Warn] 9612-10 (JobWorker) pdfforge.PDFCreator.Core.Jobs.AbstractJob.CleanUp: Error while deleting source file: The process cannot access the file ‘C:\Users\Bob\AppData\Local\Temp\PdfCreator\Spool\0EED8C6880B34CC98196B2BA364F2852.ps’ because it is being used by another process.
The above is the last run from the info log after I tried to make sure there was nothing I was doing to effect the temp file.
bonjour, j’ai fait une rapide installation de la nouvelle version, quelque questions : - il n’y a plus d’actions avant impression ? - lors du choix d’une action après impression, si l’on clique sur le point ou sur le libellé de l’action, le programme ne réagit pas pareil, il sélectionne l’action mais n’affiche pas les options dans un cas - une question/ajout possible à moins que celà soit déjà possible dans l’ancienne comme dans la nouvelle version : dans le paramétrage du nom du fichier généré, pourrait-on utiliser les variables d’environnement du système, cela permettrait d’en créer une par programme et ainsi ne pas avoir à exécuter un batch après enregistrement pour renommer le fichier
Here is a vote to provide a clean, customizable installer on a commercial basis. I know you need to try to make some money from CreatePDF, but just by offering a professional, licensed installer with no adware installation and maybe some customizable features (allowing multiple printer instances would be my favorite) and I would be a customer. I guarantee you would make WAY more money than what your advertising partners are throwing down for the number of people in my organization. Plus I install PDFCreator now, I just work hard to get rid of the adware so you aren’t getting a cent from me (I don’t like it that way, but that is the current situation). That way the software could be still free and open source, I just want to buy a nice installer experience from you guys and am willing to pay.
@BobBob: We will look into this. We have created a cleanup process, that deletes files from the temporary folders that are older than 2 days, so they will not pile up. But of course that is just a fallback strategy, the temporary files should be deleted after the conversion ends.
@bp: I am sorry, but my french is not too good and I do not understand your points. Could you repeat them in english?
@lgallion: We are actually working on such an installer right now. After first (failed) attempts with MSI and InstallAware, we are now using WiX and this looks quite good so far. We will thus be able to provide a setup for professional users without advertisements and that is better suited for large deployments.
will there an option to convert text to curve in 1.9? I have problems printing my pdf files when fonts are embedded. Without embedded fonts special types are not printed.