What is a PDF virtual printer?

A virtual PDF printer allows you to create PDF files from any other format. It is possible to convert a file into PDF simply by opening it with the relative program (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, text editor ..) and printing it as you would normally print it, except that instead of selecting a hardware printer you select the virtual PDF printer. This effectively creates a PDF version of the file that we printed via the virtual PDF printer. With this procedure, you can convert virtually any type of file to PDF format.

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Finally Sejda has been released!

Hi All,
great news! After more then one year of development today we released Sejda!
You are probably asking “What the heck is Sejda?”. It’s a PDF manipulation layer written in Java. “uh?”. Ok, as many of you know I’ve been working on PDFsam for 6 years now and I realized at some point that the pdfsam-console (the component providing pdf manipulation capabilities to PDFsam) has some… mm… limitations.
Quoting Sejda FAQ:

I realized at some point that some of the design choices I made were unfortunate and the code base wasn’t inline with 2010 software development standards. PDFsam itself was/is working pretty well but maintenance was/is a bit of a hell so I made the choice, I started to rewrite the pdf manipulation logic with 5 years of experience on my shoulders and trying to keep a close eye on quality and best practices.

What are the advantages compare to the pdfsam-console?
Quoting again:

it has more features, it has a bigger team working on it (we are 2 now), it’s built trying to follow best practices from Joshua Bloch in Effective Java and Robert C. Martin in Clean Code, it’s easier to maintain and extend and it’s not tied to a single pdf manipulation library but it tries to take advantage of strength points of all of them

It’s not going to affect PDFsam in the short period but I’ll start to work on a new release using Sejda as manipulation library.

Now you may ask “why should I care NOW then?”. We developed and released a Command Line Interface together with Sejda called sejda-console. It provides a set of commands to manipulate PDF documents using all the features provided by Sejda and for all the ones of you using the pdfsam-console and brave enough to switch to the sejda-console, it may be a good opportunity to try it and give us back some feedback. To make it more interesting I have to say that the sejda-console provides some more functionalities compared to the pdfsam-console:

  • crop
  • pdf to tiff conversion (single or multiple output)
  • pdf to jpg conversion
  • text extraction
  • split by bookmark level where the bookmark matches a given regexp

We really hope to have feedbacks, opinions and suggestions from you, as you always did with PDFsam. You can find a lot of information, download link, javadocs etc at the Sejda webpage.
Enjoy!

oh, of course Sejda is free and open source.

Upcoming release

Hi everybody,
more than 2 months have passed since the last release but the next one is almost ready. With the next version all the enhanced users will have a new module to set pdf metadata (Title, Author..). For both basic and enhanced I spent some time implementing requests about the user interface like drag and drop support on Linux, save and load environments that saves and restores the selected module and finally, after many requests since the beginning of this project, the user interface will be restored every time you open/close PDFsam, this means the main window size, position, the 2 split panels and the selected plugin.
I want to really thank all those users who supported PDFsam (fortunately a lot) with money, ideas, suggestions, emails etc… you keep me working on it with enthusiasm.

Cannot find javaw.exe

Windows only.
If, when you double click the pdfsam.exe, an error window shows the message “Cannot find javaw.exe”, it means that it cannot find a working Java installation. To solve this problem try installing (or reinstalling) a working Java Runtime Environment (1.4.2 or above). It can be found here http://www.java.com .

Andrea