To find out more about the new release visit the product updates page for Debenu Quick PDF Library and read the press release.

Inefficient.

Not a very funny joke I’ll admit, but as the first words out of my mouth were “are you joking” when I heard about the consultant who advises lawyers to do exactly the above, I thought it was fitting.

It’s certainly true that taking a PDF and printing it to paper and then scanning it back to PDF is going to accomplish two key things:

• destroy any hidden text and metadata
• make the PDF hard to use (it will need to be OCR’d before any text can be searched for or selected)

Why would a lawyer want to do this? Well, as one example, during the discovery phase of a lawsuit it might be necessary to send the opposing party certain documents. You don’t want to accidentally reveal any sensitive information that is somehow hidden in the document, so it’s necessary to take some precautions. Another reason might be that you don’t want to make life easy for the opposing party, so you want to send them a PDF that needs to be OCR’d (which will create a lower quality PDF).

Of course this doesn’t just apply to lawyers, there are many people who will want to make 100% sure that there is no hidden information in a PDF before they send it to someone else.

That’s why we added a special action in Debenu PDF Maximus called ”PDF to Image-based PDF”. Technically the steps required to print a PDF to paper and display a PDF on a computer screen are the same. In both scenarios the PDF is rendered to an image format and then sent to the printer or displayed on the screen.

So why not just take the rendered image and skip the printing to paper bit? The end result is the same — you have a new PDF that is an image-based PDF, that is it doesn’t have any text objects or hidden text/metadata — but you don’t waste time, money and paper printing the PDF and then scanning it back to PDF.

Luckily Debenu PDF Maximus is here to save you time and money, use it to process a single file or thousand of files, in a batch process or through an automated workflow with watched folders.

Debenu is pleased to announce the launch of its new website (www.debenu.com). We hope you’ll find it easier to get around, and enjoy the extra product info we’ve provided. If you have feedback on the site, please contact us.

Branding Consolidation

One of our goals for 2012 is to consolidate our products under one brand.

Up until now we’ve had products called Benubird PDF, Quick PDF Tools, Quick PDF Library, ARTS PDF Aerialist and Debenu PDF Maximus, to name a few. This can be a little confusing as it isn’t immediately obvious to our customers that these products belong to Debenu.

This being the case we made the decision late last year to consolidate the brand names under the Debenu brand so that instead of Quick PDF Tools we’d have Debenu PDF Tools and instead of ARTS PDF Aerialist we’d have Debenu PDF Aerialist and so on.

Housing all of our products under one brand will help to reduce any confusion customers might have over product names and help to increase recognition of the Debenu name.

Going forward the new product names are:

• Debenu PDF Aerialist (formerly ARTS PDF Aerialist & Pro)
• Debenu PDF Aerialist Lite (formerly ARTS PDF Aerialist Lite)
• Benubird PDF (no change)
• Debenu PDF Crackerjack (formerly ARTS PDF Crackerjack)
• Debenu PDF Maximus (no change)
• Debenu PDF Tools (formerly Quick PDF Tools)
• Debenu PDF Tools Pro (formerly Quick PDF Tools Pro)
• Debenu PDF Workshop (formerly ARTS PDF Workshop)
• Debenu Quick PDF Library (formerly Quick PDF Library)
• Debenu Quick PDF Library Lite (formerly Quick PDF Library Lite)

Website Consolidation

When we first launched Debenu PDF Tools (formerly known as Quick PDF Tools) in 2009 we gave it its own website (www.quickpdftools.com) but in early 2010 we moved Debenu PDF Tools to the main Debenu website and redirected the old website.

In late 2010 Debenu acquired the ARTS PDF business unit from Nitro PDF. Since that time we have been running the Debenu website (www.debenu.com) and the ARTS PDF website  (www.artspdf.com) in parallel, maintaining the ‘ARTS PDF’ and ‘Debenu’ branded products separately.

With the launch of the new Debenu website – ARTS PDF now resides completely at Debenu (www.debenu.com). This means, for example, that ARTS PDF Aerialist has become Debenu PDF Aerialist and ARTS PDF Crackerjack has become Debenu PDF Crackerjack.

For the time being Debenu Quick PDF Library will be available on the Debenu website and on its own website (www.quickpdflibrary.com), however, we aim to have fully transitioned Debenu Quick PDF Library across to the Debenu website by the end of the year.

The Past, The Future

August, 2010, will mark 5 years of operation for Debenu. It’s an important milestone and a good opportunity to take stock of what we have accomplished so far.

In 2007 we started work on Benubird, a personal document management system, and released the first versions of it in late 2008. Since then Benubird has been installed by over 50,000 customers and has gained a very loyal user base.

At the start of 2009 we made our first acquisition when with iSEDQuickPDF from SEDTech and released it as Quick PDF Library. iSEDQuickPDF had an existing loyal user base and we were able to quickly build upon that to make it the leading royalty-free PDF developer library on the market today.

Shortly after releasing Quick PDF Library we released Debenu PDF Tools (formerly known as Quick PDF Tools), a utility for manipulating PDFs without needing to open them. It quickly gained popularity and has had over 200,000 installations in just over two years.

Towards the end of 2010 we acquired ARTS PDF from Nitro PDF and along with it added Aerialist and Crackerjack to our product catalogue, as well as the other Acrobat plug-ins and server products.

At the same time we purchased Planet PDF, the number #1 site for PDF news and a thriving PDF user forum, with over 15,000 page views per day.

During 2011 we released version 8 of Debenu Quick PDF Library, a major version release of the PDF SDK, revamped Aerialist to work with Acrobat X, started development on new releases of Benubird and begun work on a new product, Debenu PDF Maximus, for unrivaled PDF workflow automation.

In 2012 you will see major new versions of Maximus, Aerialist, Crackerjack, Benubird, Quick PDF Library, Debenu PDF Tools and perhaps a new product or two (hint: you’ll be able to pick it up with one hand).

To all of our customers who have joined us on this journey so far, we say thank you, and we look forward to continuing to reward your loyalty over the next 5 years.

If you have any feedback on the new website or questions about the product and branding consolidating, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

The new version includes two key new features, a preview option for Stamp Text, Stamp PDF and Stamp Image actions, and a new Flatten Layers (Optional Content Groups) action, as well as other enhancements and bug fixes.

We recommend that all users upgrade as soon as possible.

Don’t forget, if you purchase Debenu PDF Maximus before the end of the month you are eligible for a 20% discount.

If you have any feedback about the new release, please leave a comment.

To celebrate the release of Debenu PDF Maximus we’re offering a special introductory discount of 20%.

So from now until the end of March, 2012, you can purchase PDF Maximus for US$495 US$396.

Just use this coupon code 20PEROFFDPM when purchasing Debenu PDF Maximus to receive your discount. Buy online here.

…and don’t forget, if you provide us with feedback on Debenu PDF Maximus you will go into the draw to win a prize.

This is a maintenance release which includes the following changes:

• Introduced fast cached refresh for Navigator, Tags and Filelist panels
• Highlight files in workspace with icons
• Restore file list columns order
• Fixed the file list issue crashed with a large number of files
• Fixed bugs in excluding svn files during import
• Fixed bugs with PDF operations
• Fixed Tags panel painting errors
• Updated BCGSoft Professional Library to version 17
• Other minor enhancements, documentation update and bug fixes

We’d love to hear about how you’re using Benubird at the moment – why don’t make a post in the Benubird forum or shoot an email to sales@debenu.com

Microsoft has released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and along with it comes Windows Reader, a built-in PDF viewer for Windows and other file types.

Windows Reader uses the new Metro-style interface and appears to be aimed at users of touch devices, but does work with PDFs opened from Windows Explorer as well.

The Planet PDF team and contributing editors will be watching the release of this new PDF reader with Windows 8 closely, so stay tuned.

Read the whole Windows 8 PDF Reader article at Planet PDF.

The Quick PDF Library Team has worked quickly to implement a hot fix so that customers can upgrade to Delphi XE2 Update 4 and continue to develop PDF applications with our PDF SDK.

The hot fix and more information is available from the Quick PDF Library blog:

Special Quick PDF Library Hot Fix For Delphi XE2 Update 4

Debenu PDF Maximus is an industrial-strength solution for automating your PDF workflows when you need to split or merge PDFs, convert images to PDF, stamp text or watermarks on PDFs, extract text, control metadata and much more in a batch process or silently via watched folders.

Download 14 day trial or purchase.

Features include:

• Split and Merge PDF files
• Insert Dynamic Text Stamps with Page Number, Date, Time and Author Details
• Stamp Watermarks on PDFs
• Convert Images to PDFs
• Convert PDFs to Images
• Remove Annotations, Attachments, Bookmarks and JavaScript
• Crop, Rotate, Delete, Extract and Insert Pages
• Extract Text and Images from PDF files
• Extract Embedded Fonts
• Extract PDF Form Data
• Flatten PDF Forms
• Edit Initial View Settings
• Control Document Metadata
• Watched Folders for Workflow Automation
• Easy Batch Processing

Win a Prize: Customers who provide feedback by way of a comment on this blog post or by emailing us at support@debenu.com will go into a draw to win a copy (eBook) of PDF Explained, a new book about PDF from O’Reilly Media. Five winners will be drawn randomly from those who submit feedback. Make sure your blog comment includes a valid email address.

To complete the survey please click on the link below:

• Aerialist Customer Survey

The survey will help us to quickly compile the feedback you provide and it should only take a few minutes to fill out. We’ll use the results from this survey to plan what enhancements should be made to Aerialist and what new features we can add to meet your PDF needs.