frankieandshadow
09-21-2009, 09:52 PM
Thank you for this free product. The new beta is definitely an improvement over the previous version which was IMO a retrograde step from the one before. There's a lot of things the product could do that it doesn't, but I appreciate the scope of the product is limited to it's free status, so my comments address the limitations within its present scope.
Bug: if you choose to append to an existing file, it fails silently if Acrobat has the file open (as it often will be with the default option of viewing the PDF file).
Problem: There are no keyboard accelerators on any of the dialog controls. The default of Save means you can now do the default from the keyboard, unlike the previous version, but anything else still requires you to use the mouse or laboriously tab around the buttons.
Feature: as well as Append and Overwrite, it would be useful to have a Rename option which appends a (2), (3) etc to the name until it is unique. Indeed it would be good to e able to use Append or this Rename as an option automatically, so the file name dialog doesn't need to pop up at all, and pressing Save just makes it work with one press of Enter. Even better, a third option to not even have to do that - just pop up the dialog (I guess you still want to advertise!) and have it create the PDF according to the rule (append, rename) selected, so completely non-interventional operation.
Problem: mail merge from Microsoft Publisher causes the PrimoPDF dialog to pop up for *every page* of the merged document. As a mail merge can account for many thousands of pages, this is an extreme pain! I appreciate this is a Publisher problem in that it creates a separate print job for each page (for a real printer this is not an issue, of course). I think the easy way to solve this is to have the automatic unattended append option I mentioned above.
Bug: if you choose to append to an existing file, it fails silently if Acrobat has the file open (as it often will be with the default option of viewing the PDF file).
Problem: There are no keyboard accelerators on any of the dialog controls. The default of Save means you can now do the default from the keyboard, unlike the previous version, but anything else still requires you to use the mouse or laboriously tab around the buttons.
Feature: as well as Append and Overwrite, it would be useful to have a Rename option which appends a (2), (3) etc to the name until it is unique. Indeed it would be good to e able to use Append or this Rename as an option automatically, so the file name dialog doesn't need to pop up at all, and pressing Save just makes it work with one press of Enter. Even better, a third option to not even have to do that - just pop up the dialog (I guess you still want to advertise!) and have it create the PDF according to the rule (append, rename) selected, so completely non-interventional operation.
Problem: mail merge from Microsoft Publisher causes the PrimoPDF dialog to pop up for *every page* of the merged document. As a mail merge can account for many thousands of pages, this is an extreme pain! I appreciate this is a Publisher problem in that it creates a separate print job for each page (for a real printer this is not an issue, of course). I think the easy way to solve this is to have the automatic unattended append option I mentioned above.