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Development Notes

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Here is a log of significant changes made to PDFX since its inception in June 2006. Minor enhancements and bug fixes are not listed.

Date

A-Shell Version

Description

December
2023

1752.1.2

Email refinement: support OAUTH2 authentication in Method 4. Requires ASNHET.DLL (Windows) or libashnet.so (Linux) 1.14.191.

November 2022

6.5.1721

Various Fixes and Refinements

February 2022

6.5.1711

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.

December 2021

6.5.1710

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.

March
2020

6.5.1701

Enhancement: You can now use the email capabilities of PDFX for sending emails without any PDF attachment. Use EMAIL METHOD 4. This is an extension of a capability introduced in A-Shell 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 must be followed by some other Email.xxx directive.

August
2019

6.5.1665

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.

May
2017

6.3.1548

Email Type/Method 4: if nothing is in the created PDF, and there is at least one additional attachment, then the created PDF will not be included in the attachment list. This allows PDFX to be used, with Email Type/Method 4, as a means of emailing pre-existing documents without the need to generate a new PDF.

April
2016

6.3.1509.3

The NOABORTDLG option in the printer init files now automatically sets the //PDFX,Saver.ShowProgress dialog option to false. The theory being that if you don't want the one popup dialog, you presumably don't want the other.

April
2016

6.3.1509.0

Passing the WAIT switch to XCALL SPOOL when generating a PDF file using PDFX5+ now results in the routine waiting until the file is written to disk before returning.

April 2015

6.1.1407

Begin beta testing support for PDFXv5.

April
2014

6.1.1383.3

PDFX refinement: When using Email.Type 5 and 6, any errors will now cause the Debug Message window to be displayed with the error message. You can find error descriptions in this document here MAPI Error Codes and also at this Microsoft site.

6.1.1383.2

Support for UTF8 added to PDFX.

6.1.1383.1

New PDFX Email Defaults.

6.1.1383.0.1

Email Methods 5 and 6 Implemented.

6.1.1383.0.2

PDFX enhancement: New PDFX directive "AttachFile" specifies additional files to be attached to the email in Types 4-6. Syntax: //PDFX,Email.AttachFile,filespec, where filespec is a standard file specification (AMOS or native) for the additional file(s). You may have up to fifteen AttachFile statements per document.

6.1.1382

PDFX Email Type 4 enhancement: The Email.SMTP.UseSLL option can now be set to 2 to invoke the StartTLS protocol. The port should be set to 25 or another non-encrypted port; the connection starts out in un-encrypted mode and then negotiates a change to TLS encrypted mode. This change is actually implemented in ASHNET.DLL 1.6.140 and no actual change to ASHW32.EXE was needed.

July
2009

6.0.1155

PDFX refinement: //PDFX,Save.FullFileName now distinguishes between paths that have dots in them, and filenames, by whether the dot has a slash to the right of it. For example, "//PDFX,Save.FullFileName,\\mydomain.com" is treated as a file, whereas "//PDFX,Save.FullFileName,\\mydomain.com\" is treated as a directory.

September 2008

6.0.1124.4

Refinements to PDFX Email.Type.4: modify format of the PDFX Log File, and add/improve GDIPRT tracing.

6.0.1124.2

PDFX enhancements to support improved SMTP mailing via Email Method 4.

June 2006

5.0.969

Implement PDFX in A-Shell.