PDFing Home Page Installing PDFing
This document discusses the installation options for PDFing. Click the following links for information about applying license-keys.  If you have PDFing v3 or v4 installed on this PC, please refer to our document upgrading to PDFing version 5.


If you have downloaded file: pdfing5setup.msi and there is no prevous installation of PDFing on this PC, then you only need to double-click on this file to begin the installation process. Once completed, you will find a short-cut to PDFing on your desk-top.


Users running Windows 2000 or later should open the Sharing form using menu option [File|Sharing] and use its controls to install or uninstall the PDFing service. You may use this form to share the PDFing directories across the network so that NT service clients can connect to the service from remote systems. This form also allows you to select new locations for the directory containing the PDFing configuration and markup files and for the directory containing the spooled-files queued by PDFing.
If you weant to adjust the properties of the service, open the "Service" control-panel applet and select service: PDFingMailer..

Controlling NT Service

This form allows you to start and stop the PDFingMailer service. Additionally, you can select the start-up and log-on options to suit your particular requirements. Please note that the log-on account may not be able to accessed "mapped" drive-names. So, if you want PDFing to save a copy of a PDF files on a remote system, you must use the UNC naming convention to specify the directory name.  
You can use also the SC.EXE command (see Windows SDK help) to control PDFingMailer on a remote machine.


In order to view the spooled-files converted by the PDFingMailer service program, you should execute program PDFingCntrl.exe from the "PDFing" directory on the system running the service. Once started, PDFingCntrl.exe displays a PDFing icon in the windows icon tray. You may right click on this icon to display a pop-up menu, or double click on this icon to display a window showing the status of the service.

You can create a "short-cut" to the copy of PDFingCntrl.exe that is installed on the PC running the PDFingMailer service.. Do not make any copies of PDFingCntrl.exe, as they wil not be able to connect to the service!

The PDFingMailer service logs its activities to the "Event-Log" of the machine on which it is running. You should use the "Event Viewer" application, (under "Administrative Tools" on the Windows Start Menu) to see the event messages relating to application services, including PDFingMailer. You can sort and filter these messages from the "View" menu of this applet. PDFingMailer will send event messages grouped into types & categories. The types are "Error", "Warning" and "Informational". The categories are "General" relating to starting and stopping, "Lpd" relating to spooled-files received, "Cvt" relating to PDF document creation, "Keep" relating to locally stored documents and "Smtp" relating to e-mailed documents. You can use the [Logging] page of the configuration program to select which events should be logged.

Please be aware that the Event Log can get full. If this happens, then new Event Messages will not be added and the statistics provided by the server status screen will be incorrect.


To un-install the PDFing service, first use the windows administrative tools applet: "Services" to stop the PDFingMailer service, then open the directory where PDFing has been installed and run the file: ServiceUninstall.bat as an Administrator. After a second or two, you should see the following message:

Installing NT Service

You will need to un-install the PDFing service, if you install PDFing into a different directory from the one where the service was previously installed.


This document ©Jane Hearn 2004-2013.