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This blog will inform you about news on PDFCreator as well as aspects and stories around pdfforge.

  • PDFCreator as MSI - The never ending story

    philip | 04/27/2012 - 10:39

    We know that the requests for an MSI Installer are coming regularly and that a lot of admins has the need for this. Many users have donated for this and we bought InstallAware some time ago. I have spent more than a month of development time this year to create and MSI Installer with InstallAware.

    The actual installation works, but InstallAware's way of passing parameters in silent installs is via command line parameters. Unfortunately, there are no command line parameters when deploying the setup through an Active Directory. The only way to pass parameters is through an MST file. This in turn is not able to change parameters within InstallAware. The suggestions from their side would be to read the path of a settings file from the registry, which could be set via GPO, but this does not appear as a reasonable solution to us.

    So we have wasted a lot of time developing something without use for anyone. At the same time, the MSI is only required by admins that are deploying through AD, as other tools allow to deploy EXE setups as well. This still leaves a good amount of admins out there, but it does not affect all admins. We don't know when we can take up our efforts on the MSI topic again, as we are currently planning a lot of improvements and a complete rework on PDFCreator itself.

    If anyone should regret having donated money back then, we of course will pay it back. In that case, please just leave a mail with your PayPal address and - if you have it - the Transaction number, so we can refund the money.

    I hope that we will not leave you too disappointed here and hope, that we will be able to find a solution for this in the future.

  • pdfforge.org in French

    philip | 04/17/2012 - 14:48

    It has taken a bit of time, but finally the french translation at fr.pdfforge.org is completed. There are of course some parts of the site that are untranslated (this blog, for example), specially in areas, that need frequent updates.

    As we do not speak French, this will remain this way, but ensures that the information are up to date.

    We want to say a big THANK YOU to Kévin Jorand who did the translation for us. And a big sorry to all french users who had to wait so long for the translated pages. We were just trying to find someone when Kévin approached us that he could translate the site.

    Now we can concentrate on improving PDFCreator again.

  • PDFCreator 1.3.2 released

    philip | 03/26/2012 - 10:02

    We have just published PDFCreator 1.3.2 to fix some problems that still have been present. The full list of changes can be found in the manual: http://www.pdfforge.org/content/whats-new

    The most important issues should be the poor performance with large files and that PDFCreator stayed in memory after printing a file. Both is now solved, together with a few other small fixes and improvements.

  • PDFCreator 1.3.1 released

    philip | 03/16/2012 - 11:11

    Just five days after PDFCreator 1.3.0 we are now releasing PDFCreator 1.3.1 to fix two severe bugs and some minor things. As many of you will have noticed, PDFArchitect did not load PDF files properly with the english translation. This is fixed now. The new pdfcmon.dll did crash on Terminal Servers, which is now fixed as well.

    We have also fixed smaller things like the PDFCreator windows that stayed open after printing and the problems with special characters in the filename, which leaves brackets in the title. We have also added some languages and added a comman line parameter /Expert to the setup, which allows to set installation path and such again but leaves the average user in peace with this stuff.

    Finally, we hope that there will be no need for a 1.3.2 in the next days.

  • New site, new server structure

    philip | 03/15/2012 - 15:24

    For many years now, we are using Drupal as our content management system. It has served us well and over some versions so far. As more visitors arrived, we had to enable different ways of caching and optimize the size of the pages, to keep the server load under control.

    With the latest release, we again hit a limit on our server. Though the pages were cached, the apache server still had to call php, do some calculations and then server the site. So had to move one step further. We now use Varnish in front of our server. This allows us to serve the pages from the cache right away. To fully support the caching, we had to upgrade Drupal to the compatible Pressflow system. It is based on Drupal, but includes some optimizations for performance and caching issues present in Drupal.

    With this new combination, we are able to serve regular pages really fast. When I use the developer tools of the Chrome browser, I see around 120 to 200 ms until the page html is loaded. The whole page including images is loaded and rendered in less than a second. That's really amazing. Now I am excited to see when we will have to upgrade the web site the next time...