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.
v8.6 [Aug 17, 2018]
- Feature: Option to disable certificate creation. The software offers the possibility to create a self-signed certificate to sign a PDF. This option can be deactivated. For this you have to set the DWORD value NoSelfSignedCertCreation=1 in the settings in the registry. You can also set the DWORD value NoCertManagerAccess=1 to hide the links to open the certificate manager.
- Feature: Merge function in assistant can use name of first file The DWORD value AssistantJoinFilesUseFirstName=[1|0] can be used to control whether the wizard should use the name of the first file for the merged file when merging files.
Optimization: More options can be configured in the HKLM area for all users. For further options, the HKLM area can now be used to store configurations centrally for all users. This means that almost all relevant options in the HKLM area are now possible.
- Optimization: Some error messages are now more meaningful. Some error messages are now more meaningful and partly contain recommendations to solve the problem.
- BugFix: Code page in the debug console fixed. Special characters and umlauts were not displayed correctly. The code page was incorrect. This is now fixed.
- BugFix: Fixed scrolling problem in the page extraction interface. Some documents could not be scrolled down far enough so that some pages were not visible. This problem has been solved.
