PDFCreator 2.4.0 Released with Dropbox and user tokens

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Today we are releasing PDFCreator 2.4.0 and with it, the respective versions of PDFCreator Plus, Business and Terminal Server.

Dropbox integration

PDFCreator now supports to upload files to dropbox as action during the conversion process. This makes sharing documents much more convenient, as you can also create share links for the uploaded files and include them in the mail you send out. When Dropbox and share links are enabled, you can use the token in the E-mail client action or the SMTP action to insert the links in the mail. In that case, the files will not be attached to the mail.

We think this is a great way to save on mailbox storage and make sharing documents more convenient. It also improves collaboration as forwarding mails with attachments becomes much easier. Please note though that everyone who receives the share link is able to view the document and that you don't have control who this link is forwarded to. You can revoke the links from Dropbox at any time though.

In order to use Dropbox, you have to authenticate your PC from PDFCreator with Dropbox. During the process, you have to log into Dropbox and confirm the access. Afterwards, you get an access token that is saved within PDFCreator. We encrypt this link, but it could still be access by other people on your computer. We will never get access to the token our your account though.

Included in these Editions

check PDFCreator
check PDFCreator Plus
check PDFCreator Business
check PDFCreator Terminal Server

User Tokens

This has been a user request for a long time and finally we have finished an implementation - and it was surprisingly complicated. With the user token feature, we give the advanced user the possibility to define own tokens directly in the original document. The original PostScript file will be analyzed for user tokens, which will be removed from the file after extracting the value. This gives you a lot of abilities. You could:

  • Insert the document filename as token and save the PDF in the same folder
  • Extract an E-mail address that is used in the E-mail action
  • Set the document title through a token
  • and much more...

 

Inserting a token in a document is as simple as adding a line like this somewhere: [[[NameOfToken:User token value]]]. This defines a token with the name NameOfToken, of course, can define anything here, i.e. [[[EmailRecipientsFromDocument:[email protected]]]]

Inside PDFCreator, you can use these tokens wherever tokens are allowed. You can use them like this: <User:NameOfToken:Default value>. All user tokens are stored in the Token <User#x3E;, where you can query the token by name and also set a default value, each separated by a colon.]

If you want to use the E-mail address from the example in the E-mail action, you could define the receipients like this:

<User:EmailRecipientsFromDocument>.

You can see that the E-mail address from the document is extracted, inserted into the mail and removed from the document during conversion.

When the tokens are removed from the PostScript file, we remove the whole line they are in, as we can't seperate the individual positions. What is considered a line quite depends on the way to printing application gives us the data. In most cases, it is the safest to add the tokens in a separate line in a very small font to make sure there are no line breaks inside them.

This feature is quite experimental, so we are still testing a few things. If you should have a problem or a use case not currently covered, please do not hesitate to contact us. And a big Thanks to the users proposing this feature, we hope that you will like it.

Included in these Editions

close PDFCreator
close PDFCreator Plus
check PDFCreator Business
check PDFCreator Terminal Server

Small improvements

Performance
Sometimes it could take some time for the PDFCreator windows fully loaded. We did a lot of work under the hood to improve this and you should see and feel the result.
As always, you can find the all changes in the release notes

Metadata templates
In addition to title and author template, you can now also define templates for the fields keywords and subject.

Ghostscript 9.19
We have upgraded to Ghostscript 9.19 as it seems to be the most stable version at the moment. This allowed us to reenable a few features such as PDF/A documents with RGB colors.

 

Bye bye, Windows XP

As a last note we would like to announce that PDFCreator 2.x will be the last versions of PDFCreator that support Windows XP. We always have to find the balance between all users that we have and as Windows evolves, it gets more and more challenging to keep up to date while maintaining old OS versions. For the users on recent Windows machines, we can bring some improvements by moving to .Net 4.5 as base system. This unfortunately means, that we cannot support Windows XP anymore, as many software developers have recently. We will still support the PDFCreator 2.x branch with bug fixes and will keep that version available for our users, even when PDFCreator 3.0 is already released, which is currently planned for early 2017.