Testers wanted: PDFCreator rewrite preview

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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.

You can find the download here:
http://download.pdfforge.org/download/pdfcreator/1.9.0.126/PDFCreator-1_9_0_126_setup.exe

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.

Please leave any remarks you may have in the forum thread for this preview version:
http://forums.pdfforge.org/discussion/11150/testers-wanted-pdfcreator-rewrite-preview-version