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.
v9.0 [Aug 7, 2019]
- Rotation option for paper and overlay available: We've added a rotation option to the Paper and Overlays option block that lets you customize the paper or overlay page orientation according to the actual document.
- Option to use the save file name chooser dialog in auto save mode: This option can be used to let the user decide where to place the current file in automatic save mode. If this option is enabled and the PDF printer is configured in automatic save mode, a dialog box appears for selecting the file name in which the user must select the save path.
- Merge with zipper method available in the Creator: There is now also the new merge with zipper method available. This new merge mode merges page after page (page one from first file, then page one from second file, ...). This tool is added to the toolbar of the app.
- Function to reverse the page order now available: The Creator has a new function to reverse the page order of a document. The function is available in the context menu of a file that was opened there. Right-click an open file or click the new menu icon, and then click the appropriate menu item. This tool is very useful for scanned documents to reverse the page order and get the backs in the correct order. This is necessary for the new zipper merge, for example.
- Document toolbar of the Creator now has a burger menu item: This burger menu item can be used to show the context menu of a file.
- Re-enabled the internal file explorer of the Creator: We have reactivated the creator's internal explorer and added some optimizations. The file explorer can be activated or deactivated from the main menu of the program.
- Copy/Paste improvements in the PDF reader for form fields: Copy/Paste could not be used in older versions of the Reader for form fields. This is now possible and you can use Ctrl C and Ctrl V in form fields.
- PDF printer file name detection improved: We have improved the code that is responsible for recognizing the filename and path of the printed files. The new algorithm is slightly better.
- Replacement of special characters in file names: We found some more places where special characters in the filename were not replaced. This could lead to unsaved files or unwanted behavior. Invalid file name characters are now also replaced for files attached to a mail to avoid problems here.
- Overlay and paper method improved: We are now using a new algorithm to combine the contents of the files (digital paper and actual document), which gives better results under different conditions. The old method can be used by setting overlay.mode = "old" in the Windows registry settings.
- Translaton file updates.
- Fix for a special PDF auto rotate pages bug: We found this special case that could lead to incorrectly rotated pages in PDF files and we fixed it.
