PDF Converter Services 8.4 — PDF/A-3b, Improved Email, MS Word and HTML Converters

Over the past 10 years, we have always made it a habit to listen to our customers, especially when kicking off the development of a new release. Once you receive a request, or bug, more than once, you’d better do something about it.

However, during the last 3 to 4 years things have changed. Naturally we still listen to our customers, but Muhimbi is now its own biggest customer. What!?

Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, no one carries out more operations in a real-word production environment than we do in-house. Why is this? Well, our popular cloud based services, the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online, and the Muhimbi PDF Converter Services, use the exact same engine that we ship alongside our on-premise products.

Because our Online customers fully depend on us, our data centres and our software, the responsibility to keep things up and running has shifted from our customers’ IT departments, to our own operations team. Although our products have always been very stable and scalable, there were plenty of minor hiccups that we did not know about because it wasn’t too much of a problem to our customers. However, when you run your own software at a very VERY large scale then all small things add up.

To cut a long story short, we monitor our online services like a hawk. Each and every issue, no matter how big or small, is recorded and analysed. If we can help it, we fix it. As a result we have improved and fixed dozens of issues in the new 8.4 release of the Muhimbi PDF PDF Converter Services (on-premise).

Naturally we added some new functionality as well. The key changes are as follows:

• Support for PDF/A-3b in addition to existing support for PDF/A-1b and 2b.

• Support for 3rd party OCR engines.

• Support for TLS 1.2 throughout.

• Automatically generate named destinations based on PDF Bookmarks.

• Support for merging of PDF Portfolio files.

• Optionally unhide hidden Excel columns and rows during PDF conversion.

• PDF Conversion of Outlook contacts (in MSG Format).

• PDF Conversion of delivery and read receipts (in MSG Format).

• Support for targeting ‘last page’ when watermarking documents.

• Many improvements to Email, AutoCAD, MS-Word and HTML converters.

• New unattended installer.

A quick introduction for those not familiar with the product: The Muhimbi PDF Converter Services is an ‘on premises’ server based SDK that allows software developers to convert typical Office files to PDF format using a robust, scalable but friendly Web Services interface from Java, .NET, Ruby & PHP based solutions. It supports a large number of file types including MS-Office and ODF file formats as well as HTML, MSG (email), EML, AutoCAD and Image based files and is used by some of the largest organisations in the world for mission critical document conversions. In addition to converting documents, the product ships with a sophisticated watermarking engine, PDF Splitting and Merging facilities, an OCR facility and the ability to secure PDF files. Separate SharePoint and Cloud-based Subscription services are available as well.

When upgrading from a previous version, read this Knowledge Base article first.

The main changes and additions in the new version are as follows:

• 4145 AutoCADFixUpgrade AutoCAD Converter

• 3033 AutoCADFixCad drawings converted into PDF have syntax issues

• 2941 AutoCADFixWhen AutoCAD conversions are running in parallel they sometimes fail

• 1902 AutoCADFixHebrew Font Rendering doesn’t work for AutoCAD conversions

• 3977 ConversionNewAdd support for XLT and XLTX

• 3610 CoreFixPrint Spooler service is not started on DocumentConverterService startup

• 3449 CoreImprovementIncrease default file size limitation to 100MB

• 3889 CoreImprovementSuppress info logging for diagnostic requests

• 1560 CoreImprovementImprove Debug logging for PDF Splitting

• 3517 CoreImprovementExtract OCR text action does not log into the DocumentConvert.log file

• 2140 CoreImprovementImprove cleaning up of old Temp Files

• 2934 CoreImprovementMove Conversion Service to .net 4.0

• 4369 CoreImprovementAdd support for TLS1.2 in Core Web Service

• 4031 CoreNewImplement Windows / System Temp and cache Folder cleaner

• 3903 CoreNewImplement Request specific regional settings (Date format, time zone etc)

• 4407 DocumentationImprovementUpdate documentation about FIPS

• 3907 EmailFixMSG Converter - Content goes missing from beginning of line

• 3324 EmailFixMSG Converter - UTF-8/UTF-16 encoding issues

• 2932 EmailFixMSG Converter - Incorrect line spacing

• 4135 EmailFixOverflowException converting msg file

• 4368 EmailFixMSG Conversion - URLs containing # not converted correctly

• 4376 EmailFixSome embedded images in a MimeFile email are disappearing

• 4308 EmailFixMSG conversion - Image does not appear

• 2117 EmailFixFailed MSG Conversions leak files in Temp folder

• 4174 EmailImprovementMSG Converter - Fix ‘sent date’ when converting email drafts

• 4377 EmailImprovementMSG rendering errors when FitWidthScaleImagesOnly is used

• 2802 EmailNewMSG Converter - Make it possible to change page size and margins

• 4066 EmailNewMSG Converter - Add support for displaying of Contacts

• 3976 EmailNewConversion of MAPI report emails to PDF (Read receipts, delivery receipts)

• 4364 EmailNewReference error for msg file type containing excel attachment

• 4067 ExcelNewImplement facility to un-hide Excel Columns and Rows

• 4217 HTMLFixStrange letter spacing in pdf converted from html

• 4210 HTMLFixSome websites cannot be converted

• 4304 HTMLFixHTML based Email conversion is impossible for certain locales

• 3397 HTMLFixWebkit HTML Converter returns empty PDF when child process dies

• 4289 HTMLImprovementSystem crash under high HTML Conversion load

• 4375 HTMLImprovementAdd support for TLS1.2 in HtmlConverter

• 4642 ImageFixJPG files with invalid EXIF tags convert into blank PDF

• 4032 InfoPathFixInfoPath cache cleaner does not work on some systems

• 4353 InfoPathImprovementAdd support for TLS1.2 when fetching XSN files

• 3187 MergingFixMerged document cannot be saved

• 3169 MergingFixNamed destinations are duplicated in certain scenarios

• 3152 MergingFixNamed destinations are lost during merge

• 3142 MergingFixNamed Destinations with German ‘umlaute’ fail

• 4069 MergingFixPDLayoutDontCare error during merging

• 3263 MergingFixChinese character displayed incorrectly in merging error messages

• 3148 MergingFixPDF.ConvertAttachmentMode=RemoveAll doesn’t appear to work

• 4753 MergingFixPdfNamedDestinationCollection exception during merging

• 4745 MergingFixLayering problems after merging certain documents

• 4750 MergingFixNullReferenceException in GetNodeCount while merging documents

• 2791 MS-WordFixDIP is not stripped for some MS-Word files

• 2294 MS-WordImprovementFix filename field in headers and footers when converting Word files

• 734 MS-WordImprovementFix conversion of Documents containing the ASK / FILLIN field

• 3429 OCRFixNullref exception in UnicodeTrueTypeFont.SetSymbols during OCR

• 3428 OCRFixNullRef Exception in ITrueTypeFont.GetCharWidth during OCR

• 4245 OCRFixGDI+’ errors when carrying out OCR on certain documents

• 4657 OCRFixError while reading image’s width during OCR

• 3124 OCRImprovementReturn PDF AND text in single OCR operation

• 3082 OCRNewAdd support for 3rd party OCR engines

• 4317 OCRNewCalculate and return number of pages for OCR operations

• 2920 PDFFixPDF/A Conversion - Validation Error - contains action of type launch

• 1910 PDFImprovementImprove support for merging Acrobat PDF Portfolio Files

• 3109 PDFNewAdd support for PDF/A-3B

• 4737 PHPImprovementFix PHP Soap libraries

• 4143 PHPImprovementUpdate PHP Proxies and sample code

• 4138 SetupFixDocument Converter Service installer does not open firewall port

• 2632 SetupImprovementReview and update unattended installer

• 2555 SetupNewAdd ’unattended (u)ninstallation chapter back to the admin guide.

• 4734 TOCFixToC generation fails if decimal separator is not ‘.’ (period) for the locale

• 3540 TOCFixTable of Contents titles not respecting page-break-inside: avoid rule

• 2860 VisioFixVisio hangs on some files

• 4187 VisioFixSome Visio files are not converting

• 3989 WatermarkingFixFont errors when watermarking documents

• 4236 WatermarkingFixLayers’ related problem when watermarking PDF

• 3936 WatermarkingImprovementAdd support for watermarking last page

For more information check out the following resources:

• Product Page.

• Brochure.

• FAQ & Knowledge Base.

• Release Notes.

• Administration Guide.

• User & Developer Guide.

• All PDF Converter Services related Blog Posts.

As always, feel free to contact us using Twitter, our Blog, regular email or subscribe to our newsletter.

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