Datalogics Inc. is excited to announce a new version release for both our PDF Checker and our PDF Optimizer scriptable server tools. Each of these releases focuses on streamlining access to valuable information about your PDFs and providing more power to automate robust document workflows. Let’s take a deeper dive into what’s new and what it means for you.

About PDF Checker

PDF Checker is our free PDF analysis tool that provides a detailed report on a wide-ranging scope of conditions about each of your documents. It works as a standalone document checker, but it is especially powerful when used in conjunction with PDF Optimizer as a means to conditionally apply relevant optimizations to documents that meet (or fail to meet) certain conditions.

With this release, automating your post-processing actions based on PDF Checker results is now easier than ever with the new JSON format output report option. Previous versions of PDF Checker only offered a text file log that was designed to be both human readable and machine readable. While this is still offered as an option and works well for quickly observing the results, the new JSON report is specifically designed for scriptable workflows to drive conditional actions, collect/aggregate/analyze data, or otherwise programmatically leverage information about your PDF documents to accomplish your goals.

About PDF Optimizer

PDF Optimizer allows you to streamline your PDFs for optimal performance based on your specific needs. Whether you’re looking to compress documents to be as small as possible, ensure they load fast for web viewing, or format for long-term archival preservation, PDF Optimizer can be flexibly adjusted to optimize for your use cases. With this release, PDF Optimizer delivers two new logging features – a command-line summary that highlights overall optimization results, and a detailed log that reports every action PDF Optimizer performed. With this information, it’s easier than ever to assess the impact of optimization and track file changes.

Combined Power

Along with these new improvements, PDF Checker also offers built-in optimization recommendations. We’ve made it simple to programmatically drive PDF Optimizer based on conditions reported by PDF Checker to ensure your documents are fine-tuned to meet your needs. In fact, these two products are so effective together that we’ve merged them into a single installer – starting with this release, when you download PDF Checker for free, the same installer will ask if you’d like to install and evaluate PDF Optimizer for a free trial period. If you directly download PDF Optimizer for a free evaluation, you can go ahead and install PDF Checker, which is free forever. Each work as independent tools but together they offer a powerful solution for conditionally optimizing PDFs.

Use Cases

Here a few use cases this update supports:

Use case #1 – PDF archiving:

Say you need to ensure your documents are all PDF/A compliant. PDF Checker will allow you to quickly sort which PDFs are already PDF/A files and which require further processing. You can easily pass the PDF files that need processing on to PDF Optimizer, which can convert them to PDF/A.

Use Case #2 – Large scale data collection

Let’s say you want to assess what percentage of your PDF files require a password to open contain XFA forms, contain a signature, contain only scanned images, cannot be opened, contain images with a resolution below a certain dpi, or above a certain dpi, or some other condition that matters for your workflow, PDF Checker can help. PDF Checker can quickly batch process a large archive of documents or otherwise constantly process incoming documents. With the new JSON output, you can collect this data for each document and aggregate the data via a database.

Use case #3 – Remove potentially harmful scripts

Let’s say you need to strip JavaScript from PDFs for security purposes. PDF Optimizer can perform this optimization on your PDFs, and the new reporting features will provide confirmation that JavaScript has been removed. If you need further records of this removal, you could run PDF Checker on the original document to generate a “Before” record, process the document with PDF Optimizer, and run PDF Checker again on the output for an “After” record, which will show that the JavaScript is no longer detected in the final result.

Try PDF Checker & PDF Optimizer Today

In summary, we’ve made PDF Checker and PDF Optimizer better than ever, and we want to invite you to try them out today! Visit our website to get started.