After a long time finally the new 3.0.0.M2 is out, ready to be tested! It took us a while to reach this point and the reason is that we changed the PDF engine behind PDFsam, moving from iText to SAMBox, a fork of PDFBox that we maintain and where we applied tons of changes in the past months. It has been a tremendous effort for us but we now have a deeper understanding of the PDF specification and the low level code that powers PDFsam, this allows us to go full hands when we want to fix a bug or add a feature, from the GUI down to the PDF engine.
As usual you can download it here and report any issue here.
Next is coming the MSI installer and other platform packages.
Currently not available the visual modules, they will be developed in the future and perhaps included in a separate distribution.

16 Replies to “Time to try PDFsam 3.0.0.M2!”
    1. The forum is temporary down until I decide what to do. We are working on the new website and the forum is simply too much effort to keep clean from spammers so we are thinking about a different tools to provide support, direct emails, Stackoverflow, knowledge base or the GitHub project page issue tracker. From the user point of view there’s a new combo in the merge module where you can select what to do with AcroForms. Ideally the switch from iText to SAMBox is smooth and you don’t see any difference in the generated documents, you could actually see smaller output when you select compression. In practice the engine is completely different so you could see failures where things were working before, and fixes where there were failures before. The advantage now is that you can report failures to us, send us the PDF and we can take a look and fix the engine directly, we now have the knowledge and the tools.

  1. I love the existing verison 2.2.4 and I am looking forward to the 3.0 upgrade! Sounds like a great effort you have put into it! However I have a feature request: I would like to take a multi page PDF-document and select page sections with zoom/rectangular mark and recompose that into a new document where the selected area has been scaled up. For my purpose I have a 100 page technical specification document and would like to select the exact same 2×2 cm on each page and blow them up in the new document. It could also be multiple selections on one page I guess.

  2. I tried the 3.0.0.M2 on MacOS 10.11 with Java 8 U60 installed, however it is not working. It displays the splash screen on startup and the loading bar, but then nothing happens anymore and if have to force quit the application.

  3. Hello Andrea,

    I’m testing PDFSAM as part of a Software Testing college class project. I’m interested in knowing the usage statistics of each of the major functions/features of the basic version. Would you happen to have a rough estimate of the probability of usage for each of the available features? I’m looking to see if some of the features are used more often than others.

    Thanks!

  4. I would really be looking forward to when the visual modules especially the Visual Reorder which I think is the most powerful tool that v2.2.4 has, as it enables you to easily re-order a PDF; rotate specific pages, unlike the rotate function which is harder to use. I also use it to compress the files and convert all my PDF files to Version 1.7 so it is therefore very handy.

  5. Hello, I wanted to know as to how the project can be launched on eclipse using the source code? I tried importing it but there seems to be no main function in the code. Kindly help out. I am taking up this project for a small testing class project.

  6. Huge bug with split by bookmark, works in M1, splits on incorrect pages in M2. Not sure the best place to report 3.0 bugs.

  7. Andrea, I am having an issue with the merge function. After I merge the file, I hit the “clear” button on the top left of the window. That clears the cache of the previously merged files. But it does NOT clear the “Run” function at the bottom of the screen (Version 3.0.3). Why is this happening? I have to close pdfsam and then reopen for it to clear. Very time consuming and not productive. Thank you in advance for your reply.

  8. “Clear” is referred to the selection table so it only clears the selection table. I’m not sure I fully understand what you are asking, it doesn’t clear the other settings but you can change each of them without having to close the application, so if you need to change the destination file you can just use the “Browse” button or edit the field… is this the issue?

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