Do not be misled by the program’s name – PDF24 Creator does much more than “creating PDF files”. Actually, the Windows version has been renamed PDF24 Toolbox, which says more accurately what it really is. This Swiss-army knife kind of tool offers 34 PDF-related utilities to all users at no cost. The program can be enjoyed either online or as a Windows standalone program, and it will let you perform tasks that are usually available only on costly PDF editors.
This excellent and versatile PDF macro tool offers a wide variety of utilities in one single software application. While most PDF editors ask for a usually fairly expensive fee, PDF24 Creator is available for free and in two versions – online and Windows-based. Both variants offer you the same functionality, which has been split into 34 buttons that will take you to 34 highly useful utilities. Surely, the program lacks some of the functionality that – for certain users and companies – makes professional PDF editors worth the fee, but for the average user, PDF24 Creator can easily become that perfect inexpensive solution they will ever need.
Each of the 34 buttons that appear on the main interface lead to a clear interface. They’re all different and alike at the same time, so that regardless of which tool we pick up we’ll always know how to go about its functionality without any help. Clearly, the standalone version mirrors its online counterpart when it comes to interface design, which has its pros and cons. Some of the dialog boxes look too big for a Windows program, and sometimes we’re forced to scroll down a bit to find a certain button. Also, if you happen to close the tool, you’re using instead of using the “Home” button at the top of the window, you’ll be closing the entire application inadvertently. Still, you just have to try two or three of its tools for a couple of times, and you’ll find out how easy it is to get used to it.
Without being exhaustive, I will mention but a few of the 34 utilities included in the program to show its amazing capabilities. PDF24 Creator or Toolbox comes with OCR capabilities, which means that you can scan a document as a PDF file or take an already existing scanned PDF and “extract” the text that appears there just as part of an image. You can also convert PDFs into various formats, including EPUB (right from this version) and different image file formats, and extract as independent files whatever images are in the PDF. Going quickly though some of its minor (yet always useful) utilities, you can merge, compress, edit (with restrictions), protect, unlock, split, rotate, sort, and compare PDF files, among others.
I invite you to discover and try the entire list of tools and utilities by yourself. You’ll surely be pleasantly surprised.
v7.4 [Oct 5, 2015]
Feature: New tool to compress PDF files
The main change of this version is the new PDF compression tool. This tool can be used to compress existing PDF files by manipulating some parameters which reduces the size of PDF files. The tool is very easy to use. Just open it, add PDF files, modify the default settings if you like and have a look at the resulting size. If the new size is acceptable, save the compressed PDF files. You can also open the compressed file to ensure that the quality of the compressed file is good enough.
Improvement: Operating window optimized
We have optimized the operating window because we have seen some problems under certain conditions. The window could block an operation and could not be closed in that state. We have overworked the relevant parts so that the problem should be fixed.
Improvement: Optimized determination of printer job file names
If the name of a print job is very cryptic or if the name represents an URL it's a bad decision to choose that name as a file name because the name can also contain some bad characters. The file chooser dialogs warns the user in that case. We have optimized a bit here. We replace bad characters and use alternative names if the name is very long.
Improvement: Tooltips improved
The software uses tooltips to explain the tools. Tooltips in old versions where a bit limited. We have improved that parts so that tooltips can now also be multi-line and displays at better positions. Now we can show better and longer texts which helps to understand that tool better. The new compression tool uses the new tooltips.
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