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.
v11.3 [Jul 14, 2022]
- pdf24.exe backend system starts when together with the toolbox if the backend process is not already started: If the pdf24.exe backend system is not running, it is started by other PDF24 apps. The PDF24 Toolbox did not do this. This has now been changed so that the Toolbox also starts the pdf24.exe backend system.
- Webview2 updated: The current version 103.0.1264.49 of Webview2 is now used. How to use the Evergreen version of Windows is described in the manual in the registry settings section.
- Installer: More translations added.
- Installer: Checkboxes for creating the Toolbox/Launcher icons: The new checkboxes allow you to control which desktop icons should be created. Usually this is an icon for the toolbox. But now the user has the possibility to decide which icons should be created.
- Installer: MSI Installer detection integrated: If another PDF24 installation via MSI already exists, this will now be detected by the EXE installer.
- Toolbox: Fixed problem when closing the app: Closing the application window right after it appeared could result in a process still running in the background. This problem is fixed.
- Toolbox: Create bookmarks based on file names: The Merge PDF and the Images to PDF tool have now received an option to create bookmarks based on file names. Some users have requested such a feature. If the bookmark function is used with the Merge PDF Tool, then the Java-based implementation is always used when executing the function, since this feature is only available here.
- Toolbox: Problems with merging many PDFs fixed: The Java-based PDF implementation had a problem merging hundreds of files due to command line length limitations. This problem has now been fixed. We have implemented a new command execution mechanism to overcome this limitation and to generally increase flexibility for features we will add in the near future.
- Toolbox: Javascript workers are now destroyed: The previewer now destroys the pdfjs webworker when the previewer is closed to release resources.
- The PDF page renderer, which renders all pages of the PDF, now also destroys the pdfjs webworker when all pages have been processed.
- Toolbox: Potential toolbox crash fixed: The PDF thumbnail generator now uses an executor to limit the number of thumbnail generators running in parallel. The toolbox could crash because too many resources were used by massively parallel running thumbnail generators.
