Introduction > PDFX FAQ

Here are some common questions and answers on PDFX and its capabilities.

Will current GDI formats convert to PDF with this utility?

All of A-Shell's GDI print directives work as they did before; there is no change to that whole set of operations. PDFX introduces an additional batch of GDI print directives that are specifically for handling PDF-related functions. Just as the font directives begin with //SETFONT, so do all of the PDFX directive begin with //PDFX,.

In case that didn't answer your question: yes, everything that currently prints through the A-Shell GDI printing system—i.e. anything with PASSTHROUGH=OFF, whether or not there are actually explicit GDI directives in it—should come out identically via PDFX.

The //PDFX directives are just for extra functions that only apply to PDFX. They will be ignored if you send the report to a non-PDFX printer.

I want to suppress the A-Shell printer dialog. What is NOABORTDLG and how does it work?

The A-Shell Reference (Setup... Printer Configuration... Init File) describes the following:

NOABORTDLG = <boolean>

By default, when A-Shell is printing, it displays a typical Windows printing abort dialog, which allows the user to abort the printing operation before it completes. Although this is typical Windows practice, the abort dialog could be inappropriate for a couple of reasons. One is that all but the largest printouts are generated so quickly that the abort dialog is an annoying flash that appears and disappears before the user has a chance to even see what it said. The other is that you might not want to make it so easy for the user to accidentally abort a printout. Whatever the motivation, you can eliminate the dialog by specifying the NOABORTDLG = TRUE option in the printer initialization file.

There is also a “Saving…” window that appears during PDFX writing. Can I eliminate it?

Yes. See Hiding Progress Window

Can PDFX be used to generate PDFs from regular PC programs?

Yes, but…Your PDFX license, which tells the PC-based software "this is a legitimate and properly licensed copy," is embedded in the data string transmitted by A-Shell. If printing directives are received from any source that is not A-Shell, such as a PC program, then the PDFs will have "Demo Mode" prominently displayed. To eliminate that, you can purchase a retail copy of the driver from www.tracker-software.com/. Note that the retail copy functions the same as before with A-Shell.

Can the PDFX printer be shared?

No. There are both technical and marketing reasons for this. Although our license is based on users rather than workstations, the developer of the driver also sells individual retail copies for general use, so obviously they wouldn’t want to allow all the users at a site to share a single copy of the driver.

Note the one exception is that the version 5 driver can be installed once on a Terminal Server and effectively shared by all the Terminal Server clients.