A-Shell 6.5 Development Notes

1721.0.1

Various PDFX Fixes and Refinements.

1720.5

Fix: XTREE / PDFX: Printing to PDFX from the XTREE Print Preview window was acting as if PDFX was not licensed—i.e., showing the watermarks. Note that within this print preview window, you have to select the PDFX printer which contains "A-Shell" in the name; the regular PDF-XChange Standard will not work.

1720.3

Fix: When generating multiple emails within the same session using Method 5 or Method 6—i.e., relying on the default email client via the MAPI interface—PDFX was in some scenarios failing to update the file attachment and attaching the previously generated file to the next email.

1718.2

Fix: String values in some //PDFX directives were not working properly if they started with a numeric digit, e.g. an embedded font named "3 of 9 Barcode".

1711.0.20

Enhancement to PDFX printer selection: the printer matching algorithm, which normally accepts the first left-anchored partial match between the specified DEVICE name in the printer initialization file and the printer name in the Windows printer list, now favors PDF-Xchange Standard over earlier versions when there are multiple possible matches. As always, you can eliminate uncertainty by specifying the complete name in the DEVICE statement.

1711.0.21

(Enhancement to MX_LASTPTRFIL, affecting PDFX): MX_LASTPTRFIL previously worked properly only if the WAIT option was used in the prior SPOOL request. It now returns the last filespec written by the PDF-XChange Standard driver (for the current session) regardless of the switches. But since the file writing operation is asynchronous, the WAIT option is still required to be sure that the filespec returned is from the last print request and not from a prior one if the application has gotten ahead of the printer driver.

1710.0.1

Enhancement: PDFX now supports version 9 of the PDF-Xchange driver, which is now called "PDF-XChange Standard." The interface and directives should be equivalent, but the driver contains innumerable refinements from the earlier version 5, in which the driver was called "PDF-XChange Printer 2012." Note that this major update to PDFX requires simple but important changes to the A-Shell/PDFX operating environment. See "Important Update Note" on the PDFX page on our website or Introduction...Updates...Version 9 in the A-Shell PDFX Reference.

1701.0.1

Enhancement: you can now use the EMAIL (method 4) capabilities of PDFX for sending emails without any PDF attachment. This is an extension of a capability introduced in 6.4.1548.8 which allowed sending of a set of attachments without sending the primary PDF. In both cases, the key is for the print file to not contain anything that will generate output (i.e. plain text or //GDI commands that generate output). For the body of the email message, you have to use the //PDFX,Email.Content directives. As with all other cases involving Email.Content directives, the last one

1679.1.1

Fix: //PDFX,Overlay.OverlayFile,spec wasn't converting AMOS-style specs or specs containing %MIAME% references to native format. It was working, however, with the older variation //PDFX,Overlay.File,spec.

1667.2.3

Fix: PDFX: Email.Subject lines containing a colon were losing the part of the subject prior to the colon.

1665.1.1

Enhancement: (Windows) GDI/PDFX: Remove the 512 byte limit on the overall length of individual //GDI directives, including those in //PDFX. Note that this affects only the overall length of a single //GDI directive; it does not affect any existing limits on the length of individual parameters. Also note that previously the PDFX documentation incorrectly indicated that the limit on an Email.Content directive was 1024.

1651.6

Refinement: improve error recovery when driver is unable to open the PDF output file, most likely because of an invalid directory spec or a network file system error. Previously such an error required some manual cleanup/recovery efforts, possibly including resetting the job. Note that for unattended printing services, to get the full benefit of the refinements you need to use the -ua (UnAttended) command line switch to avoid getting hung up in a message box.