Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

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chrkuhlmann
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Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by chrkuhlmann »

Hi Tracker Team,

I just found out about the new licensing in v9 and I have a few questions that I could not find answers to in the documentation and FAQ.
  1. For online activation, how regularly is the activation status checked?
  2. What happens with an online-activated install, if it is offline at the time it wants to re-check the license? Do I lose all Pro features then until I go online again or is there a grace period?
    This is important for laptop usage during travel (think airplane or ship) when I have no internet access. It is also important in case my ISP has some troubles and I don't have internet for a few hours. Will I still be able to work?
  3. If I use the offline activation method, will I have to repeat the offline activation steps regularly or will the License remain active until deactivated?
  4. How do I perform de-activation for an offline-activated license, in case I get a new computer or have to re-install the OS?
    I suppose I need to have access to the PDF-XChange install on that computer and generate a deactivation request file that I need to upload similarly to the activation request file? I could not find anything about the steps for deactivation of an offline activation in the docs, you might want to add them.
  5. What happens if I do not have access to an offline-activated PDF-XChange install for de-activation, because the install goes corrupt or the PC does not work any more because of a storage failure? Is the activation lost or is there a procedure to recover the license of a corrupt offline installation?
  6. How do I find out how many activations I have left? Is it just the number of licenses * 2 (for PC and notebook) minus the devices listed in the activation list? I still have a v7 key (on maintenance), so I might not get all the info that would be shown for new keys.
  7. Is there a limit on how often/frequently I can perform online activation, given that I deactivated at least one device before trying to activate again?
  8. Is there a limit on how often/frequently I can perform offline activation, given that I deactivated at least one device before trying to activate again?
Sorry for the long list, but I will have to decide whether I want to extend my maintenance in a few weeks, and I need answers to these questions to come up with a decision.


On a more personal note, I have some feedback on the new activation system.
Up to now I have been an extremely satisfied customer and very happy with PDF-XChange editor / PDF-XChange Pro tools.
The software and support are great, updates have been frequent and useful, bugs have usually been fixed very quickly and even if it occasionally took longer to fix a bug, it was fixed eventually.
Installation management up to this point was virtually non-existent: Install, enter your key, update the software regularly if you want, and it would just work.

Now, with the new activation system in place, I'm not sure whether this change is for the better (for customers and Tracker Software):
  • As can be seen by my long list, many questions now pop up that previously just were not necessary because the licensing terms were very user friendly and simple.
  • I tend to prefer to buy software with such simple licensing terms. In fact, most licenses I where I keep renewing/buying addtional ones are those where I am not forced to do so (because they are perpetual and not activation counted). Call me old-fashioned but I feel trusted as a customer by these terms, and I like to repay that trust by supporting those companies. So I do not worry too much whether the update is really worth its cost as long as I perceive the costs as "fair" for what the software does.
  • Professionally, I have to work with costly software that has very strict licensing terms, which are ensured by lots of DRM. Although the software is powerful and the features and price somewhat justify the need for a license server etc., it still creates lots of issues and headaches:
    You cannot work remotely, because the licensing terms do not allow access to the server from a VPN. Even as an ordinary user, you regularly need to babysit your installation because of licensing troubles, let alone all the additional work for the admins. Every little network hiccup affects your ability to work and sometimes risks entire project schedules. Setting up a new seat is a nightmare and even if you have the money for an additional seat, all the overhead makes you think twice whether it is worth the effort or whether you just shift the task to a user that already has a license allocated.
My point here is: I can reluctantly understand the need for a one-time online activation/check to avoid license abuse by people that use a single user license for an entire company, if this has been an issue for tracker.
But this regular activation check has so much potential for causing trouble and work interruptions, that I'm not sure whether in total it will benefit Tracker Software.
The honest customers (those might be the ones you want) become annoyed, and the shady ones just find ways to work around your system or jump to the next product that has not "upgraded" its licensing system yet.
In the end, you don't earn more money (because people that weren't willing to pay are not suddenly willing to pay just because of an online activation step) and you lose loyal customers and good reputation.
I've seen this cycle before with other software products: A really good product gets popular because of its features and its hassle-free use. Then the licensing becomes more strict because management sees license abuse and thinks that they could earn more if they sell these licenses. What really happens is that now the loyal customers have lots of troubles and stop buying additional seats and stop promoting the software. Sales stagnate and long term customers are switching to competitors. What remains is a software that slowly declines by the loss of its core user base. As the market-share drops, so does the ability of the software to gain new customers. Only those few that are deeply caught by lock-in effects remain until they finally reach a point where they can justify a clear cut.
I've seen this happen to really large software products that have a serious lock-in effect and few competitors. I suppose it will be more pronounced for a PDF software/toolkit.

Sorry for the rant.
I guess it shows how much I care for your software. Would be a shame to see this process repeating. I still hope you will be the exception or that you improve your license terms.

Kind regards,
Chris
bernard meunier
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by bernard meunier »

Hi,
I had previously a V8 personal license for PDF Tools along an active support contract.
I fully use PDF tools through scripts or desktop shortcuts.
Whenever updated to V9 may I still continue using PDF Tools along scripts/Shortcuts?
Regards
Bernard
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John - Tracker Supp
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by John - Tracker Supp »

Hi Bernard and Chris,

Let me try and answer your questions as best I can - hopefully this will reassure you that our intentions are not nefarious or unduly restrictive.

Firstly in general terms let me advise you why our licensing activation has had to change.


In Version 8 of our products we provided an optional OCR Plug-in which was chargeable and the 'Engine' for which was provided by LeadTools software - this was well received for the most part by English Language users and others where the style of content was straight forward and non complicated - but for many others it proved problematic and not outstandingly satisfactory. We of course have no control how accurate and reliable 3rd party products are - nor indeed over how any support or bug fixes are handled.

So whilst the LeadTools engine did a good job for many - for a significant proportion of our clients it did not.

OCR is a very very expensive and complex technology and it would not be practical or timely for us to try and create our own (incidentally we did have such a project attempting to do this for approx 2 years from about 2006 onwards - however it became clear that this would be a long term and costly project and would not reap rewards in a practical time scale)

So we discussed the issues with LeadTools over the past months and it became apparent whilst they wanted to assist and would - it would take some considerable time to address the issues reported and extend the language set available to meet our diverse client needs.

We therefore settled on an alternative 3rd party tool after some months of testing and licensing negotiations from Abbyy Software - the Abby FineReader OCR Engine and our upfront investment to them has been significant - hence the reason we have rolled it out not as an optional item - but as a standard feature of PDF-XChange Pro and PDF-XChange Editor Plus.

Part of this licensing requirement was that we could identify and provide an audit trail for each license sold and ensure that licensing and therefore Royalties to Abbyy were verifiable.

We know from our own sales of developer toolkits that not only end users can and do abuse Licensing terms and conditions - but Developers can - and do also - to avoid paying in full for the technology being licensed.

The Abbyy FineReader Engine we knew even before we released it to our clients as we implemented it - was a significant improvement over the previous offering and feedback from a wide range of clients from numerous geographic locations and using numerous language sets has been outstanding.

The Activation update has as explained largely been implemented to ensure we could meet our legal and financial obligations to our partner in the above technology and IP integration - though it does also provide us too with some assurances that our own product licensing is not abused.

Having provided some background for these changes, let me just offer some more specific information - without giving away any secrets that would aid those who would try and bypass these verification necessities.


1: The Activation does require you to be online to initially to install and validate your license - although we are providing administrators of larger installations a toolset that allows them to perform this in a manner whereby individual workstations need not be online - provided a central server is available that is that will record and report back on license activation's acting as a Proxy for this purpose.

You can also activate your license via our web site and your account page manually if system you are installing to has no internet connection - for now - however if this is subject to widespread abuse then we will reconsider this option if necessary.

2: The periodic background checks that will be made are very infrequent and random to minimize inconvenience and irritation for all users and will occur only when you are already online - for most users this should take place only perhaps once or twice annually.

You will not lose features if a background check is unsuccessful on a previously activated system - but should you try and update to a later build this could be blocked until either a successful online installation or update is performed or your online account for the system in question is re-verified.

3: Deactivation again can be performed online via your account pages on our web site. There is no limit to the number of times this can be performed - though suspicious activity in relation to the number of licenses etc will be monitored.

Please also note that whilst it is not generally a concern for private/home users or smaller commercial installations - larger corporate clients take license management and adherence very seriously and have been asking us for some time for a better way to ensure that license abuse does not occur and that we take a more active rather than passive role in ensuring that license abuse does not occur.

As always - we are here to help and will do our utmost to answer users questions and deal with issues - if necessary modifying and refining this process as experience and feedback suggest is necessary

Whilst we cannot divulge every aspect as to how this process will work or is applied - as you will appreciate to do so would render some of the safeguards and protection methods open to abuse and pointless in implementing in the first place - if we can answer further questions we will here - or perhaps best by email should we not wish to make certain aspects public generally.

Thank you for the kind words and rest assured it is not our desire to make life difficult or problematic for our clients and we will do all we can to make this process as trouble free as possible.
If posting files to this forum - you must archive the files to a ZIP, RAR or 7z file or they will not be uploaded - thank you.

Best regards
Tracker Support
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bernard meunier
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by bernard meunier »

Hi,

Thanks for providing information regarding reason for changes.
Well understood and accepted also.

However, this don't confirm either or not I can continue using PDFTOOLS
once V9 licensing is activated?

I didn't yet have I try at: does PDF-XChange PRO installation package will
also install PDFTools (needed in my case).

Regards
Bernard
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Ovg
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Ovg »

bernard meunier wrote: Sun Jan 24, 2021 8:59 am
I didn't yet have I try at: does PDF-XChange PRO installation package will
also install PDFTools
20210124_121411.png
It's impossible to lead us astray for we don't care even to choose the way.
PDF-XChange PRO, 10.1.1 (Build 381) / W7 SP1 x64
Arnold
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Arnold »

I installed PDFX PRO v9 and it installed the Editor and Tools. Those seem to install by default, but you can choose not to install the printer driver, etc.
bernard meunier
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by bernard meunier »

Hi,

Thanks. Details much appreciated.

Regards
Benard
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by bernard meunier »

Ovg wrote: Sun Jan 24, 2021 9:17 am
bernard meunier wrote: Sun Jan 24, 2021 8:59 am
I didn't yet have I try at: does PDF-XChange PRO installation package will
also install PDFTools

20210124_121411.png
Thanks for pointing this out! Sometime obvious things are not for some!
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by John - Tracker Supp »

Pleasure :)
If posting files to this forum - you must archive the files to a ZIP, RAR or 7z file or they will not be uploaded - thank you.

Best regards
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guebert
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by guebert »

Hallo!

I just did the upgrade to V9. We use roaming profiles and now I have to "Activate" the key every time I change the PC (today I'm at my office PC, tomorrow I'm using my notebook with the "same" profile, the next day I switch back ...).

I't annoying and I'm wonderin, if PDFX will tell me one day, I had too much "activations" - and I'm sure, this will happen, when I need the tool ...

Because of this issue, I will not update the other PCs in my office but wait for a solution.

Any idea?

Michael
DIV
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Experience so far?

Post by DIV »

Hello, John. Thanks for a well-written explanation of the situation.

I was wondering when the new licensing system was implemented. In the title of this forum thread it talks about version 9, but I thought (maybe wrongly?) that new 'enhanced' OCR capabilities came when I last renewed my maintenance licence for version 8.

So I'm interested to know whether this has been in place now for a matter of days, or weeks, or months.

—DIV

P.S. I can also relate to the OP's comments regarding the desirability of 'no fuss' installation and operation in general, and to their comments about the quality of your software too.
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Ovg
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Ovg »

2DIV
John - Tracker Supp wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2021 11:00 am We therefore settled on an alternative 3rd party tool after some months of testing and licensing negotiations from Abbyy Software - the Abby FineReader OCR Engine and our upfront investment to them has been significant - hence the reason we have rolled it out not as an optional item - but as a standard feature of PDF-XChange Pro and PDF-XChange Editor Plus.

Part of this licensing requirement was that we could identify and provide an audit trail for each license sold and ensure that licensing and therefore Royalties to Abbyy were verifiable.
https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=35631&p=148165#p147928
It's impossible to lead us astray for we don't care even to choose the way.
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sainivedant41
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by sainivedant41 »

I had previously a V8 personal license for PDF Tools along an active support contract.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hi, all

As Ovg pointed out, the new OCR engine is a brand new change with the release of V9, licensing has as such changed in a few ways. As you mention holding a V8 key, this article may be of particular interest to you:
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowle ... ng-from-v8

There are more details, and a few alternative articles about the release available in this post:
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=35573

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
anybodym
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by anybodym »

While I do not particularly like the new stricter licensing requirements (those who do not want to pay will always find a way), the ability to deactivate devices via the web page is actually kind of nice. Would be nice to see the last "check-in" date there though to see if those devices have actually been active or are just devices that stopped existing (damaged hardware or reinstalled OS).

I do however have a major problem with what caused the new stricter licensing:

The new v9 OCR engine is complete and utter crap. The old engine was great, multithreaded and produced good results and was (after a few crashed in the early versions) really stable.

Now let's compare this to the v9 OCR engine:

OCR'ing a 40-page text-on-white Background with some stamps and signatures:
v8 on Ryzen 5900X (12-core) (german+english, accuracy high): 1min 6sec
v8 on Intel i7-8086K (6-core) (german+english, accuracy high): 1min 43sec
v9 on Intel i7-8086K (6-core) (german+english, accuracy high): 23 minutes, 0sec
v9 on Intel i7-8086K (6-core) (only german, accuracy high): 13min 50sec
v9 on Intel i7-8086K (6-core) (only german, accuracy auto): 2min 20sec
v9 on Intel i7-8086K (6-core) (only german, accuracy medium): 2min 20sec

OCR'ing a 68-page magazine-style scan with text but also many pictures:
v8 on Intel i7-8086K (6-core) (german+english, accuracy high): 6min
v8 on Ryzen 5900X (12-core) (german+english, accuracy high): 3min
v9: "there is not enough memory to successfully finish this operations... please try to select a lower accuracy" => doing so doesn't help. I have 32GB of RAM in the machine I tried this on and cannot OCR a 68 page PDF. This is a joke.

I have not made comparisons how the OCR quality is but it was always really really good on v8 and you could see that the v8 OCR engine was actually using the majority of the CPU cores most of the time. Now with v9 we are back to single threading, like it's 2004 and we're running it on a Pentium 4. Using accuracy high makes things unusably show, but even the lower accuracies are still 50-100% slower than the v8 engine. And only using a single CPU core to do the work makes me seriously doubt that the result could be any good. By the way, Finereader 12 was released in 2014 - it is seven years old. Major props for swapping out the perfectly fine multithreaded well working v8 OCR engine for Abbyys old crap from 2014 .

I'm very sad :cry: Please give us the option to buy v9 with either the AbbyCrapware or the AmazinLeadTools Engine!
I guess I'll be stuck on v8 forever now? And there probably won't be security fixes for v8 now that v9 is out - this is not good!

[Settings used for OCR: Detect skew on / Detect page rotation Off / Ignore existing On / Ignore Comments On / Ignore Form fields On / Output Type: Searchable Image / Fix content skew Off / Create new Document Off]
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hi, anybodym

Thank you for the feedback and useful details there. To be entirely honest, your report very much surprises me, we have heard nothing but rave reviews over the new OCR in comparison to LeadTools engine thus far. While most users do seem to notice a very slight increase in processing time, the actually output is usually so much better that they are willing to overlook it.

By comparison, your timing of the files definitely shows a much larger difference in processing time that I have ever seen. If I could ask you to please send us a copy of those documents and screenshots of the relevant OCR settings you used for each test (if any are different from what you stated above), so that we can reproduce this here and begin working on a proper resolution, It would be greatly appreciated.

Furthermore, your statement that LeadTools OCR quality was fantastic is, intriguing. We were well aware throughout the lifetime that its quality was sub-par, and the main reason we decided not to offer it going forward was becuase the numerous issues our users had reported were either being ignored or "lost" by their team.
In turn it seemed like we were not putting effort into our own products, when we were indeed doing everything that we could. In the end it was not a good investment and we had to cut ties with Leadtools. As such, it is no longer available and likely will not be coming back. If you wish to continue using it, the only way to do so is to run our V8 products with a previously purchased V8+EOCR license key (no longer available for sale).

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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guebert
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by guebert »

Hallo support-team!

May I once more point your attention to my postinf
guebert wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:49 am I just did the upgrade to V9. We use roaming profiles and now I have to "Activate" the key every time I change the PC (today I'm at my office PC, tomorrow I'm using my notebook with the "same" profile, the next day I switch back ...).
I've found the "activation list" in my accout. As I see, there are 2 activations for 2 PCs in use. So does a "5 User Pack" mean it's a "5 PC pack"? As we use roaming profiles for logging in at our Desktop and/or NB and sometimes in one of our 3 meeting rooms do I need a licence for each PC and not for a user?

Michael
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team »

Hi anybodym.

Sorry to hear that, but currently we are actively working on OCR-performance improving, especially on OCR-multithreading. It will be very soon, please wait.

About the quality of various OCRs. The old one had a lot of persistent and intractable problems, so we had a lot of frustrated and angry clients with this OCR because the quality was really bad for their documents. Yes, sometimes the old OCR quality was quite good for some documents, but not for the most of them. And seems you were lucky that you got good results on your documents. However, with new OCR the recognition quality is much better. We've tested and proven it on hundreds of normal/problematic documents.

We understand that the speed of recognition is probably more important to you than the quality, but also keep in mind that a quick OCR-result with many mistakes - is also not very good result.

Cheers.
Vasyl Yaremyn
Tracker Software Products
Project Developer

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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Arnold »

I have not really noticed a slow down with the FineReader engine, running PDFX mostly on my laptop. Normally I don't have to deal with really big files, and this computer is no speed demon.

I just ran a comparison with a random old 7 megabyte, image only, 20 page survey with mostly text and tables that I had on my hard drive. Same settings used for both version 8 & 9 (high accuracy). With version 8 running, music playback with foobar2000 stuttered a time or two. Still, version 9 finished in 3:10, and version 8 finished in 4:10.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Intel Core i3-2310M Processor 2.1 GHz, 3MB L3 Cache, 6GB DDR3 1333MHz
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Arnold »

Further info re my last post. I ran the tests again to be sure I had timed them correctly. I was surprised by how much faster v9 was with this document. v9 again completed the OCR of the document in 3:10, and v8 finished it in 3:53.

v9 ran at 24% usage of cpu throughout, while the average v8 cpu use was 55%, with spikes as high as 95%. The cooling fan kicked on at least once with v8. v9 finished faster without using near as much computer resources. Having used the same FineReader engine quite a bit with PDF Transformer, I always found it to be more accurate.

I prefer accuracy over speed, though it is nice to have both. I don't need the speed though if it means PDFX uses 95% of the cpu causing other programs to stutter. I had noticed this before from time to time with version 8. I imagine it depends on the document. All of my Performance settings in Preferences are set to Automatic.

Thanks.
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello Michael,
guebert wrote: Fri Feb 05, 2021 12:50 am May I once more point your attention to my postinf
guebert wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:49 am I just did the upgrade to V9. We use roaming profiles and now I have to "Activate" the key every time I change the PC (today I'm at my office PC, tomorrow I'm using my notebook with the "same" profile, the next day I switch back ...).
I've found the "activation list" in my accout. As I see, there are 2 activations for 2 PCs in use. So does a "5 User Pack" mean it's a "5 PC pack"? As we use roaming profiles for logging in at our Desktop and/or NB and sometimes in one of our 3 meeting rooms do I need a licence for each PC and not for a user?

Michael
Sorry for missing this, Licenses are still "user based" not device based, but activations are counted by device. Each single user is entitled to installation on 1 desktop and 1 laptop/tablet device (this has been the case since long before activations were involved). With a multi-user pack, these devices can be shared across all users of the license. If you need further details, please email sales@pdf-xchange.com with the specific details of your environment, and how many devices your users may be accessing the software from, so we can discuss what may need to be done.
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
DIV
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by DIV »

TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Wed Feb 03, 2021 1:13 am Hi, all

As Ovg pointed out, the new OCR engine is a brand new change with the release of V9, licensing has as such changed in a few ways. As you mention holding a V8 key, this article may be of particular interest to you:
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowledgebase/553-New-Licensing-Implemented-in-V9#upgrading-from-v8

There are more details, and a few alternative articles about the release available in this post:
https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=35573

Kind regards,
Thanks, Daniel.

It is good to get your explicit confirmation that the change came upon the release of version 9.
To be clear: that specific information was not present in John's post, and so Ovg's quoting of that post was incapable of pointing it out.

Thanks also for the links.
I was not aware of when version 9 was released. From the linked post, it seems to have been on (or slightly before) 15 January 2021.

FWIW, I previously had purchased a PDF-XChange Editor + EOCR plugin license for version 8, but was still using version 7. For some reason it came into my head recently to add the new (v8) licence into my then-current satisfactorily working version 7, and the result was that it locked up some of the features! So I figured it was probably time to actually install version 8, but when I looked into it I discovered that version 9 was available, and I seem to have correctly ended up with something that seems to work, although I haven't tried any OCR with it. The Licence Key shows up as "PDF-XChange Editor (OCR)" (rather than "PDF-XChange Editor Plus") though.

—DIV
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hi, DIV

My apologies for the confusion there, but I am Glad that I could help to clarify that aspect of the case.

You are correct that V9 was released on January 14th.

As for your specific case, yes, it would be expected that the current licenses are still functional and remain as is, the system will treat them as regular V9 licenses and allow you to use your purchased features without trouble, but if you want to change it to a new style V9 key, you will need to sign into your user account to do so.
It should also be noted that any time you want to install the correct version for your license key, you can recover both the key itself and the relevant latest installer that will work with that key, at any time, from your account page: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/myaccount

Going back to your trouble with the V8 key in V7. This is because V7 does not contain an EOCR engine at all, so the changed format of the key which covered that feature caused V7 to fail recognizing the key. For some users this did not cause any issues, but for most it means that V8+EOCR keys are not backwards compatible. Regardless, it is in the past now, and a non-issue any longer as we are in V9, not V7 or V8.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
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Support@pdf-xchange.com
DIV
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v7, v8 and v9

Post by DIV »

All good :-)
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Dimitar - Tracker Supp
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Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Dimitar - Tracker Supp »

:)
scan_user
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by scan_user »

Hi,
I have a license key for PDF-Xchange Editor (OCR), with an active maintenance period (till 2022).
I have successfully used the LeadTools Engine in the past. (with no error messages)

Then, recently I upgraded to V9, and started to use the V9 OCR.
The license has been re-activated after V9 installation.
The "license key" window shows that it is activated.

But now, every time I run OCR on a document I get a yellow error message pop-up at the top that says
"Licensed features were used for this document and not covered by your existing license keys. As a result DEMO stamps will be placed on all pages if the document is saved."

I looked for those stamps, and didn't find any.
But I would still like to be sure that no unintended modifications are made to the doculemts (metadata? hidden text?)
And I would also like to have no error messages.

As far as I understand I have a complete license, and I even paid extra for the OCR, and the maintenance.
So I feel entitled to an OCR with no error messages and no watermarks.

Can you help me out, how to make this error message go away?

thanks


PS. Maybe you could have an English teacher review that error message. The "and not covered" part feels a little squeaky to me... like it should say "which are" or something more smooth ...
DIV
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Grammar

Post by DIV »

Regarding the grammar in the error message, I think the intended meaning can be read from the message, but to improve the grammar I would suggest:
"Licensed features were used for this document that are not covered by your existing license keys."
—DIV
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hi, DIV

Thank you for the suggestion, We have reviewed this and that change in text will likely be in the next release.

Scan_user, regarding the message and stamps. AS stated in the message, the stamps will not be applied until after you have both used one of these tools, and then saved the document. If you decide not to use the tool, or simply do not save the file, these stamps will never be applied.

The stamps themselves do not change metadata, they apply a visual indicator and a link to our website in the top corners of every page.
If you do have a license key in place, and are seeing the warning, but no stamps are being applied after using the tools and saving, it is quite likely you are running one of the small handful of builds we have released in the past (such as build 351.0) with an error in the key detection mechanism. To resolve that, if your key has active maintenance, simply update to the latest release (9.0.352.0).

Also, if you are still using your version 8 key where you made the purchase of the EOCR plugin, please see this article, and check you account page for an option to generate a new version 9 license which includes all the features you have paid for (and in some cases more).
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowle ... nted-in-V9

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
wschwsch@gmail.com
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by wschwsch@gmail.com »

I also have a valid license that is good for another 600 days or so. I started getting the message "licensed features were used for this document and not covered by your existing license key."

All I am doing is trying to put in TEXT boxes and radio buttons, which I have done before.

My license is still showing as valid, and it should be.

Please tell me how to correct this.
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Licensing Questions for v9 (and a rant)

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello wschwsch@gmail.com,

Please do e-mail us to support@pdf-xchange.com and we would advise what is happening!
We can't really discuss licensing issues here in the forums - as this usually requires you providing us with part of your license key, and you should NOT do that here in the forums!

From your explanation I suspect that you do not have an Editor Plus license (and you need Plus to add form fields), but we should be able to sort that over e-mails for you!

Kind regards,
Stefan
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