pdfToolbox 9.1 focuses on improving usability and reliability even further

Berlin – callas software, market leader for automated PDF quality control and archival solutions, today releases version 9.1 of its pdfToolbox product line. pdfToolbox 9.1 adds support for the Processing Steps standard, includes a new version of the Adobe PDF library and extends several main pdfToolbox features.

Improved shape technology

"The 'shape' fixup uses some of the coolest technology we’ve integrated into pdfToolbox in years", states Dietrich von Seggern, Managing Director at callas software. "We were certain customers would immediately see its value. At the same time, we were also convinced they would find use cases we hadn’t considered yet!" pdfToolbox 9.1 extends the shape technology to enable some of these use cases, such as better support for spreading or choking while adding irregular shapes.

Processing Steps

Processing Steps is a specification originally developed by the Ghent Workgroup to associate information about printing and finishing processes (such as cutting, embossing, varnish …) with a PDF document. This is done by grouping page objects in layers (technically: optional content groups), and adding metadata to those layers to identify them as processing steps. The specification is going through a standardization process at the ISO organization to become an official international standard.

pdfToolbox 9.1 implements wide support for this specification: it is possible to view or add processing steps information, check for its availability or correctness during preflight and fix common problems with it.

Place content supports SVG

The place content functionality in pdfToolbox is a very flexible way to add content to PDF documents, from simple text or page numbers, over barcodes with the built-in barcode library, to more challenging tasks with place content templates. In pdfToolbox 9.1, it is now also possible to simply add a complete SVG file to a PDF document.

Process plan debugging

Process plans are a convenient and powerful way to run complete fixup sequences on PDF documents, optionally with conditional (if … then …) processing. Building complex process plans can be challenging and pdfToolbox 9.1 helps by providing process plan debugging functionality. In debug mode, all information about processing (including intermediary PDF files and reports) of a process plan is stored. This allows running a process plan and then analyzing in detail what the result of each step was to further optimize what happens in the process plan.

New version of the Adobe PDF library

pdfToolbox internally uses the Adobe PDF library for transparency flattening or rendering of PDF documents. This library has been updated in this release, to be on par with Adobe’s flagship Acrobat DC product. This change improves reliability and quality of the transparency flattening process specifically.