Initial thoughts on latest Editor release

[justposted]

It is great to have a semi-functional release to use; especially as it is no longer a secret so we can discuss it openly. Thanks to everyone at Tracker who must have been sweating over their Christmas holidays to get it out on the 27th.

I thought I'd share my initial thoughts here. I'll start with the negatives, so that I can end positively:

1. For me, it is a real shame that the annotations are not available in this version. It means that I can't take advantage of the quick rendering, because the sort of files that really need the extra speed (e.g. big drawing files) are the ones that I need to mark-up. Of course engineers are only one, presumably rather small, part of the user base and hopefully annotations will be available on another release before too long.

2. I can't help but be a bit disappointed about how much the new Editor feels like the old Viewer but with prettier buttons. I had hoped to see some new implementation of the Find function, or comprehensive set of measuring tools (e.g. calibration, angles, editable text), or image insertion (not as an inserted page, but as a floating image). I am hoping that this is really the first stage in creating the Editor, and that now the behind-the-scenes reprogramming has happened there is a solid base on which to introduce those sorts of other functions. Calibration, for me, is essential so that I can use Editor instead of rival PDF software, speaking as an engineer.

3. I love the UI, and the background texture in particular (there's something very satisfying about that rough cloth look). It all feels very modern, clean and consistent throughout. I'm pleased that the 'cleaned up' interfaces of the two main PDF editor rivals has been avoided here, because they have made those other programs much more fiddly and confusing to use (even after a few months' practice), in my opinion.

4. The rendering speed is nothing short of amazing. The Viewer was about as fast as rival software when rendering large images, but the Editor is sometimes as much as four times faster and seems to have a good cache system (as did Viewer), so if it has rendered once, then you can zoom and pan around and it renders instantly. Amazing! Makes working with large drawing or image files much less frustrating. Sometimes it hangs for a long time for some reason (maybe it's just me), which I've submitted as a bug report, but once that's ironed out it will be an unsurpassed viewer in terms of speed.

5. That unassuming little Edit Content button must be the most powerful PDF editing function that I have ever seen! When I first started using editors, I assumed that I would be able to click on lines and move them about, or edit text, but that was not the case. Even now, the two main PDF editor programmes struggle to let you edit text, let alone manipulate anything else on the page, so you still have to draw white boxes to hide things, for example. But PDFX Editor seems to have cracked it. Now everything can be edited and that really is fantastic. Text even reflows properly, so you can edit a block of text and make it longer, without it stuffing up the look of the page. Good work Tracker. Perhaps this would be the response to my point 2, above, but personally I use basic functions (find, measure, annotate) much more often than I edit original PDF content.

All in all, a great release so far, and I am already looking forward to the next one.

[Paul - Tracker Supp]

Thanks justposted,

I must agree with you that the editing is well done and I'm sure the dev team will be pleased to hear that their hard work is appreciated.

Your criticism that some of the features needed to make this useful for everyday work are missing is very valid. As you point out, the bulk of the work you are seeing here is 'under the hood' so to speak and the addition of more of the features is not expected to be such a major issue.

So all in all I would say thanks to you for your feedback and now you can see that the core is good, that it won't be long now for the additional feature set to be added, and with just a little more patience we will have a world class application - again!

Considering the patience and support our users have shown thus far - I don't think you will be disappointed when it is finished.

Thanks for the comments and have a great new year!