Callas Software has released pdfToolbox 14. The update adds support for faster processing of personalised documents, such as VDP; several improvements to the JavaScript and Process Plan engines in pdfToolbox to make advanced automation faster and more capable; and an easier custom report engine.
‘PdfToolbox started out many years ago as a preflight tool to verify whether PDF files were suitable for their task,’ remarked Dietrich von Seggern, Managing Director at callas software. ‘Meanwhile, it is used for making PDFs production ready, to create alternate versions where needed for production, proofing or communication with clients, and in many cases even to generate more administrative documents. pdfToolbox version 14 not only adds new functionality to address new market segments, but also makes the existing technology more accessible for novice and advanced users alike.’
Callas has long known that processing speed is critical in some environments. Previous versions of pdfToolbox saw the addition of technologies such as Quick Check and Quick Fix, where a highly optimised engine handles PDF files much faster than any traditional preflight engine can for certain tasks. In pdfToolbox 14, features were added to handle personalised documents – typically documents with a lot of similar content on each page and a very high number of pages – much faster as well.
The creation of personalised documents from PDF templates in combination with structured data is another feature of the new version. This allows the insertion of textual content, bar codes or QR codes into template documents. More generically, pdfToolbox version 14 also contains a generic text search and replace fix up, which is of course also useful outside of the VDP space (previous versions of pdfToolbox were limited to text search).
The preflight engine in pdfToolbox can generate reports in many different formats: PDF, XML, HTML and JSON. For communication internally or with clients, the PDF reports are ideally suited, especially because they can be completely personalised with HTML-based templates. Creating these templates, especially for more complex report layouts, isn’t easy though; pdfToolbox 14 includes updates to the report generation engine that make this task more straightforward for non-experts. This opens up the power of customised PDF reports for more workflows.
Process Plans are the powerhouse of callas pdfToolbox. The visual editor allows for the building of complex PDF processing workflows with ease. The integration of JavaScript support allows for unlimited flexibility.
For Process Plans, pdfToolbox 14 has better exit codes for immediate interpretation of processing results, allows saving Process Plans that are missing connections (often useful during the creation and testing phase), makes it easier to enable/disable Quick Check and Quick Fix steps, and more.
Customers using JavaScript will be very happy to see added auto-completion while typing in the built-in editor, the ability to easily edit JavaScripts in Visual Studio Code instead of the built-in editor, and the ability to edit different JavaScripts in a Process Plan simultaneously in Visual Studio Code.
Profiles and Process Plans can be quite complex. As a result, they contain a lot of intellectual property. PdfToolbox 14 lets users protect such profiles or Process Plans. They can add copyright information such as a title and description, a URL where more information can be found and a major and minor version. And then pdfToolbox allows for the enabling of these profiles for a limited amount of time after installation, and/or allows restricting their use to certain pdfToolbox installations. This gives partners a way to make libraries with protected profiles and Process Plans and charge for them; essentially selling them as a service to clients.
Together with pdfToolbox version 14, callas is also releasing a SaaS version of the Licence Server solution. Licence Server is an alternative licensing way for pdfToolbox where the software is not activated on a specific machine but gets its permission to run from a central Licence Server.
Where before this Licence Server had to be installed locally (which requires some technical know-how, especially when running a cluster of Licence Servers for redundancy), callas now offers the callas Licence Server in the Cloud service. This is a fully redundant cluster of Licence Servers maintained by callas, that can immediately be used (after purchase of the necessary process or credit cartridges).
CALLAS SOFTWARE
https://www.callassoftware.com
