• I may have finally fixed the problem of extra copies of the desktop printer icon being created.
• Added an option to use a watermark or logo picture as the background of every page.
• Added an option to use JPEG compression for bitmapped images.
• Added an option to allow a higher nominal resolution. This doesn’t make much difference in most programs, but was important for Vectorworks.
• A heading that extends over two lines can now become a single bookmark, so long as there is no non-bookmark text in between.
• Fixed a bug in which bookmarks didn’t move you to the right vertical position unless the scale factor was 100%.
• Fixed a 1-point error in the size of ovals. This was most noticeable in small ovals.
• Fixed a bug that caused some word processors not to print all pages unless you used an explicit range of page numbers.
• If you Output preferences specify “Use Name Folder” and “Modify Name”, and your specified name does not end in “.pdf”, then the modification “-1”, “-2” etc. will be at the end of the name instead of 4 characters from the end.
• The built-in font substitutions now substitute Helvetica for Verdana.
Version 2.0.2
• Fixed a bug in which the Page Setup dialog could cause an application to suddenly quit if there was little free application memory.
• Fixed multiple beeps when printing from Microsoft Internet Explorer with the “fit to page” option.
• Fixed truncated labels in the Preferences dialog when running in Microsoft Word.
• Fixed a crash at the end of the printing process in PowerPoint.
• Fixed a clipping bug that could cause parts of some pages to be hidden. This definitely happened in PowerPoint, but probably in other applications as well.
• When application memory is very tight (as it often is in the Finder), PrintToPDF will use 68K code instead of PowerPC code. This is a bit slower, but less likely to get into trouble.
• When printing a Finder window, the name of a selected file or folder is now white text on a black background, instead of the less readable black on black.
• I added a bit of explanatory text to the Sizes panel of the Preferences dialog.
Version 2.0.1
• I fixed a bug that caused the Page Setup dialog not to work in older versions of the Mac OS.
Version 2.0
• The Page Setup and Print dialogs have been redesigned. All preferences have been moved to a separate Preferences dialog accessible from either Page Setup or Print.
• You can now print with a scaling percentage, as some other printer drivers allow.
• The desktop printer functionality has been simplified. I think few people were using the multiple desktop printer features, whereas many people had trouble with desktop printers multiplying like rabbits. With any luck, the problem should be less common now.
• New preferences:
• Ability to define custom paper sizes.
• Default values for General Info text: Title, Subject, Author, Keywords.
• Default substitution font, for Mac fonts that don’t have an obvious match among the PDF fonts.
• If you are having PrintToPDF save files to a fixed location, you can choose to have it replace existing files.
• Inset the “printable area” of the page. This is not needed for most applications, which have their own margin settings, but may be useful in special cases.
• Another way to specify the output file name, useful for workflow automation.
• If you are saving to a fixed location and not replacing existing files, PrintToPDF modifies file names like "Name-2.PDF" instead of "Name.PDF-2".
• Nonrectangular regions are now handled. This helps with text box borders in Quark, for instance.
• Polygon picture comments are now handled. This improves handling of polygons in AppleWorks 6.
• The General Info box visible in Acrobat Reader has slightly different contents:
• The Creator line now shows the name and version of the application from which you printed.
• The Producer line now shows the name and version of PrintToPDF.
• The Keywords line says "UNREGISTERED" if PrintToPDF has not been registered.
• Fixed a bug in the length of vertical lines. This was likely to be particularly noticeable in dotted or dashed vertical lines.
• Fixed a crash in RagTime 3.2.
• Applications that draw text using Apple’s new Multilingual Text Engine (MLTE) or Apple Type Services for Unicode (ATSUI) can now print with PrintToPDF, although the text goes into the PDF as an image rather than text.
• I have tried to make PrintToPDF fail more gracefully when there is not enough memory. But be aware that if you get a crash or freeze in low-memory situations, it’s not necessarily PrintToPDF's fault. For instance I observed Netscape 4.7.4 crashing before it reached any PrintToPDF code.
Version 1.5.4
• Fixed a bug introduced in version 1.5.3 that prevented my nice paying customers from getting rid of that (unregistered) stuff.
• Fixed 1-pixel errors in the positions of vertical lines.
• Ovals can now be filled by erasure. Pretty obscure, but needed for KaleidaGraph.
Version 1.5.3
• Fixed a bug that sometimes left the PrintToPDF Preferences file open. The only ill effect I know of was that if you tried to throw it away, you wouldn’t be able to empty the trash without a restart.
• The version number now appears in the Chooser as well as the Page Setup and Print dialogs.
• Changed the text encoding used for simplified Chinese, to fix a problem with the double-byte ellipsis character.
• More changes in the way that text rotation and scaling are handled. (My previous efforts were hampered by the fact that AppleWorks can’t scale text, and Nisus Writer does scaled rotated text incorrectly.)
• Fixed a bug in rendering of non-convex polygons. In some cases this caused a shape to be solid when it shouldn’t have been.
• Fixed a bug in drawing white text in a font being rendered with bitmaps.
• Made some half-pixel adjustments in positioning of horizontal and vertical lines. This turned out to be important for colored page backgrounds in WordPerfect.
• Fixed a problem with the Page Setup dialog in Internet Explorer 5.
• Fixed a crash when printing Set Lists in Movie Magic Screenwriter.
• Added special handling for the character: An isolated character in the Symbol font will be entered into the PDF as a bitmap.
Version 1.5.2
• Fixed a bug in version 1.5.1 that made the PDF files fail to print from Acrobat Reader although they looked fine on the screen.
• In cases where you try to replace an existing PDF file, but it is impossible to do so (e.g., the file is open), you will now get an error message instead of silent failure.
Version 1.5.1
• When you choose landscape mode in the Page Setup dialog, the page is now displayed in the portrait orientation, only the paper dimensions are swapped. (Consequently, if you want to print such a PDF file onto paper, you’ll need to choose landscape mode in Acrobat Reader’s Page Setup.)
• Clipping (also known as cropping) is handled better.
• Fixed a bug in handling of rotated text that was also scaled.
• Text rendered with bitmaps was getting cut off on the right margin in some cases.
• Text rendered with bitmaps was not appearing or causing error messages in some applications such as Word and Nisus Writer.
• Fixed several bugs that caused certain kinds of pictures to come out wrong.
• PrintToPDF generates somewhat more efficient PDF code. This may not be noticeable, for two reasons: Compression hides much of the gain, and images often make up the great majority of the file size.
Version 1.5
• There is now a progress dialog showing the page number being printed. Not all applications provide their own printing progress dialog, and one can get confused about what’s going on if there isn’t one.
• The save dialog now has a button, Set Document Info, allowing you to set the title, subject, author, and keywords that appear in the PDF General Info.
• The Creator line in PDF General Info now includes the PrintToPDF version number, and it also says “unregistered” if you have not yet registered.
• Fixed a problem in which certain peculiar pictures caused other bitmapped images in the document to be skipped.
• Fixed a clipping bug in which certain text appeared where it shouldn’t. This affected, at least, FileMaker reports and Nisus Writer footnotes.
• A character that is in a font specified to be drawn as bitmaps will no longer be ignored if it does not advance the pen position. This affects special fonts used for diacriticals.
• Fixed a bug in error handling on PowerPC machines. This could have caused an application to quit without explanation.
• Improved handling of pictures produced by ShareDraw. (Technically, PrintToPDF will now draw a filled region, assuming the region is rectangular.)
• When text was in a font specified to be drawn as bitmapped, underlined portions were underlined twice.
• The Author line in PDF General Info no longer starts with “User: ”.
• Fixed a bug whereby the PDF could be malformed if the document title included unmatched parentheses.
Version 1.4
• One can now specify a folder in which to save the PDF output. The choices that existed before (always seeing a Save dialog or saving to the desktop) are still available.
• An Excel workaround that I thought I had put in the previous version got left out. Now it is there.
• Added another Excel workaround, similar to a previous one for WriteNow, to prevent pictures from being skipped.
• Previously, text in fonts being drawn as bitmaps could not be more than 50 points high. Now it is only limited by memory.
• Version 1.3.1 inadvertently broke filling of polygons.
• Slightly reduced the size of a dot produced by a zero-length line.
• Polygons, ovals, and arcs are now clipped out when appropriate.
Version 1.3.1
• Added a workaround for a bug in Microsoft Word that sometimes caused a crash or hang.
• Added a workaround for Microsoft Excel’s habit of aborting the print job for no apparent reason.
• Added a workaround for a WriteNow bug that caused bitmapped images to be skipped.
• Added an optimization for the use of zero-length lines to draw dots.
• Bug fix: In certain cases, part of a large bitmapped image was drawn incorrectly, black or in strange colors.
• Bug fix: In fonts that were specified to be rendered as bitmaps, styles were not being applied.
• Bug fix: The special Symbol font substitution will not apply to a font that is specified to be rendered as bitmaps.
• Bug fix: In bar charts made by Kaleidagraph, rectangles that should have been clipped out were appearing.
Version 1.3
• The Font Setup dialog now shows font names in a list instead of a pop-up menu. Some people found the menu interface confusing.
• In the Bookmark Setup dialog, you can now specify required styles for each level of heading.
• In the Bookmark Setup dialog, you now set the size using an editable text field instead of a pop-up menu, so you can use any size you want. To match text of any size, you can type “any” in the field, or just leave it empty.
• Bitmapped images can now be transparent. That is, if the image is created correctly, other pictures can show through its white areas. When this feature is used, the resulting PDF file needs to be viewed in Acrobat Reader 4.0 or later.
• In vector graphics, lines with widths less than 1 point will now be rendered accurately.
• Black and white bitmapped images (including those created by the option to render certain fonts as bitmaps) are now handled in a more memory-efficient manner.
• Fixed a bug that produced error messages with an error of type -50 when handling certain unusual pictures.
• Fixed a bug that made the bitmap substitution feature fail in MS Word.
Version 1.2
• PrintToPDF is now a desktop printer, when used with Mac OS 8.5 or later.
• There are no longer any fixed limits on number of pages, number of images, etc., though one can still run out of memory when printing a long or complex document.
• Rotated text (as used, e.g., to label the vertical axis of a graph) no longer has jaggies, unless it’s in a font that you have chosen to represent as a bitmap.
• Page Setup settings are more persistent.
• Pictures that have been cropped in a certain way are handled better.
• The version number appears in the Page Setup and Print dialogs.
• Color patterns are handled better. (They still won’t appear as patterns, but as a solid color that approximates the average color of the pattern.)
• I thought I had fixed the crash in MacWrite Pro, but it turned out that there was still a crash if any palettes were open. This time for sure!
• In WordPerfect, if one printed, say, pages 3 through 5, it started out with blank pages 1 and 2.
• If a document uses the same small image twice in a row, the PDF reuses the same image instead of including the image data twice. This optimization was inspired by Word, which uses lots of tiny bitmapped images to draw dotted table borders.
• Handling large bitmapped images uses a little less RAM than before.
Version 1.1.1
• A crashing conflict with MacWrite Pro has been fixed.
• Problems saving settings have been fixed.
• The Euro symbol will now appear in the PDF file.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a crash if a document contained more than 100 bitmapped images.
• Cropped bitmapped pictures now stay cropped, at least in Nisus Writer.
• I believe I have fixed the problem that some people were having with BBEdit.
• Elliptical arcs (as opposed to circular arcs) are handled better. They are still handled imperfectly, in that the boundary curve will not be of uniform thickness.
• The substitution font for the Chinese (Traditional) script is now MSung-Light. I understand that this is a more appropriate text font.
• Fixed a bug in 12-bit color images of odd width.
Version 1.1
• You can now specify that text in certain fonts should be saved as bitmapped images rather than as text. This would be appropriate for dingbat fonts other than Zapf Dingbats, and symbol fonts other than Symbol.
• You can now choose to save bitmapped images in 12-bit color or 24-bit color. Previously they were always saved in 24-bit color.
• Chinese text (in both the Simplified and Traditional script systems) and Korean text can now be included in PDFs.
• Fixed a problem with certain special symbols (≠, ∞, ≤, ≥, ∂, ∑, ∏, π, ∫, Ω, √, ≈, Δ, and ◊) not showing up correctly in PDFs.
• Japanese bookmarks should now be legible.
• Fixed a bug that caused some applications (such as Microsoft Word) to think that PrintToPDF was not in landscape mode when it was.
Version 1.0.3
• Fixed a bug that caused text to be clipped out in certain cases.
• Accented letters in your user name should now show up correctly in Acrobat’s General Info box.
• Added a note on pictures to the manual.
Version 1.0.2
• WordPerfect seems happier about the Page Setup dialog now, though there may still be some problem.
• MS Word responds somewhat better to Page Setup changes, but it still doesn’t want to remember when landscape mode is selected.
• Fixed some color errors in pictures.
• Fixed some incorrect cropping in bitmapped pictures.
Version 1.0.1
• Fixed a bug that caused lines to draw in the wrong places in certain cases.
• Fixed a bug in handling bitmapped graphics. When printing a window in the Finder, this prevented icons from showing up.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused text after a URL to overlap.
Version 1.0a
• No change in the program, just a few corrections and additions to the manual.
