PDFCreator Server works as service and allows central management of settings and users. This results in less work for administrators.

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  • Windows Service application
  • Centralized management of the printers and settings
  • Share server printers in your network
  • Auto-convert according to your settings without user interaction
  • High performance due to the multi-threaded architecture

 

Further information on managing PDFCreator Server can be found in the user guide.

Licensing

The licensing of PDFCreator Server is based on a yearly license fee per server. The license entitles you to use the software, receive the latest updates and get priority e-mail support. A separate maintenance plan is not needed as updates and support are already integrated in the yearly all-in-one license fee.

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In case you are a reseller and want to redistribute PDFCreator Server please contact our Customer Service Team for a quotation. 

Workflow

PDFCreator Server Workflow

An admin sets up and configures PDFCreator Server. They can create one 
or more printers and share them in the network. One or more printers are directly assigned to a queue with a certain configuration.

That makes using PDFCreator Server very easy for your users: they can just print to 
a shared printer. No installation, no configuration, no user interaction required. The server will convert the printed file using the settings defined for the printer and store it in the defined location.

If the user has access to that location, he can retrieve his files from there.

And because several users can share the same printer and through that the same configuration, once your configuration needs to change for all users there is only one place where you need to adjust it.

Architecture

The core of PDFCreator Server is a Windows service application. An admin can use the included GUI application to configure and start the service. He can create printers and assign queues to them. Each queue uses a different set of settings, similar to the profiles in PDFCreator. It is also possible to adjust the amount of threads the service uses to convert files.

The use of multiple threads enables PDFCreator Server to convert more than one file at the same time. This is the main reason why PDFCreator Server is so much faster at converting files than PDFCreator when dealing with high volume printing.

On starting the service, it is initialized with the defined queues and creates a thread pool containing the set number of threads. When a user prints using a PDFCreator Server printer that was shared in the network, the service is notified about the new print job.

The job is then stored in the queue assigned to the printer. As soon as a free thread is available in the threadpool, the job gets dequeued and is converted using the settings defined for the queue it came from. Once the conversion is completed, the created file is stored in the designated location.

The fact that PDFCreator Server uses a windows service allows the application to run without a user being logged on.

Performance

For our performance tests, we have set up an Azure D14 instance (16 cores, 112 GB RAM, 800 GB SSD). We have converted 20 batches with 1000 (simple) print jobs each and repeated this on an increasing number of threads of PDFCreator Server. Below, you can find the test results including a compari-son between PDFCreator Server and the old PDFCreator 1.7 in server mode.As a quick result, you can see a near-linear performance boost when adding more threads. PDFCreator Server also can run 35 times faster than PDFCreator 1.7 if run on a powerful machine. And even in with just a single thread the performance is about 3 times faster.