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.
v8.8 [Feb 13, 2019]
- Faster language selection field in the OCR tool: We have over 100 languages available for selection in the OCR tool, which can be selected via the selection box. The list is now long and the loading time of the list was slightly higher than it should be, which was not so easy to use when working fast. We have optimized here. The language selection box is now fast again.
- Correction for an un-inserted OCR text layer in previously compressed PDF files: In previously compressed PDF files, we were unable to merge the OCR text layer with the actual PDF. Here we have also optimized to eliminate this problem. OCR is now also possible with PDF files that were previously compressed.
- Correction for overlay / underlay for PDF files with compressed PDF objects: Merging a PDF with compressed objects was problematic and we had problems with it. This problem has been solved and we are now able to merge PDF files here as well. This feature is the basis for the paper and overlay feature in the software.
- Correction for Overlay / Underlay using the "Repeat Last Page" feature: The problem has crept in one of the last versions. If the option "Repeat last page" was used, the two PDFs were not merged correctly. This problem is now also out of the world.
- Correction when sending files to PDF24 cloud services: Sending faxes to the PDF24 fax service and sending files to the PDF24 online converter resulted in an error. We investigated and fixed the problem. Users using these features should upgrade to PDF24 Creator 8.8.2.
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