PDFING NEWSLETTER NO 16 - October 2005 ====================================== It has been a busy year for us so far and this September has been a record month for sales. Rather than "resting on our laurels" we have been working on the next version of PDFing (version 3.1). This version includes the following new features: Fully integrated printing. Merge option for spooled-files. Dynamic selection of graphic images. Creation of File Properties. Windows XP "look and feel". As well as the new features, PDFing v3.1 includes numerous minor improvements including: Greatly improved "properties" form. Faster *SCS spooled-file conversion. Unlimited concurrent clients for PDFing NT service. Faster loading and sort of "open" grid. Single click on grid headings to sort. Although we are very confident about the reliability of v3.1 we would very much appreciate your help with testing, before an official release. Please download the "beta" version from: http://www.pdfing.com/down/pdfingbeta.msi and let us know what you think. It may not be too late to include any ideas that may have occurred to you. As an incentive to beta testers, we will give away the first four license-codes for the printing-feature, after that, for a limited period, we will offer the printing license-code at the introductory price of 59.00 USD. The new features are discussed in detail below our signature, so please read on. In conclusion we offer our deepest sympathy and best wishes to those of our customers affected by the terrible events of this summer. Regards David Fowle and Jane Hearn In this letter: --------------- Fully integrated printing. Merge option for spooled-files. Dynamic selection of graphic images. Creation of File Properties. Fully integrated printing ------------------------- PDFing V3.0.0.17 could only print PDF files by using third-party software from: http://www.pdf-tools.com PDFing v3.1 now included its own printing component which does not require a separate install nor any "Lua for PDFing" script. Please see: http://www.pdfing.com/pprint.html for more details about licensing etc. Merge option for spooled-files ------------------------------ It is possible for PDFing to delay sending a spooled-file until all the spooled-files in a set have been received and then to merge all the spooled-files in this set into one PDF document and send this single document as an attachment to a single email. Each spooled-file in the set of spooled-files must have a "send to destination" value specified as: *MERGE*sssss, where sssssss specifies the set name. The last spooled-file of a set must also specify an email address (or addresses) as the "notify address" value. When the last spooled-file of the set is received, all the spooled-files saved for this set, will be merged into a single PDF document attached to an email sent to the "notify address". Please note that the "additional components" must be installed. Please see: http://www.pdfing.com/pextras.html for details on downloading and installing. Dynamic selection of graphic images ----------------------------------- It is now possible to dynamically select the image-file(s) to be added to a PDF. The [Graphics] page of the markup program contains a new control labelled "Actual Name" (just below the "example image"), you may enter the full path of an image-file here, and this path may contain "special-characters", which are evaluated at run-time. You still need to select an image from the \Markup directory for scaling and positioning and this image should have the same dimensions as any image file which may be selected dynamically. If the control is left blank, then the graphics image is selected from the \Markup directory, as before. Please note that for this feature to work with "transformed" and *USERASCII spooled-files, the "additional components" must be installed. Please see: http://www.pdfing.com/pextras.html for details on downloading and installing. Creation of File Properties --------------------------- Title, Subject, Author and keywords can now be written as the "External file properties" of a file. These values appear on the "Summary" tab of the Properties display and in the appropriate columns of windows explorer. Please note that these file properties The [Convert] page of the configuration and markup programs contains a new control labelled "Add file-properties" (just below the "Keywords" control), this must be set to YES.