2020-12-23
Dear PDF-XChange Resellers,
We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best this holiday season and hope that even in these challenging times we can all relax, enjoy a little seasonal good cheer and forget our troubles for a few days.
We also need to update you on some exciting news affecting our products early in January 2021 when we will be releasing version 9 – a little later than hoped – but definitely worth the wait, we promise.
There are many new features and additions, speed improvements and the support of the ARM chipset for most Windows based hardware in the new release, far too much is added to itemize everything here, however, 2 specific items do require a mention;
1: Accessibility – we have added new formatting and functionality options for those with disabilities conforming to various international standards and Government requirements – these are comprehensively addressed in the version 9 release and we will continue to extend and refine this group of features throughout 2020 and beyond.
2: Enhanced OCR – 2 years ago we added to the free OCR provided with the PDF-XChange Editor with an optional ‘Enhanced’ OCR plugin by licensing the Leadtools OCR SDK and language sets and for many this has performed extremely well, but for some the results have not been as successful as we would have hoped and we have therefore decided in Version 9 to replace the LeadTools SDK with the Industry leading OCR library from ABBYY Software.
OCR recognition is greatly improved for many document types and for many specific language sets, users from Eastern Europe who have faced issues will see significant improvements,
Additionally ABBYY’s OCR SDK extends the number of languages supported from less than 50 to over 150, including ‘RTL’ (right to left reading) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
However this does come at a price – the ABBYY SDK is a more expensive 3rd party library for us to license and has also taken time to embed within our own products. As a consequence there will be price increases across our product range to support this addition – however on the upside we will be including Enhanced OCR functionality in our PDF-XChange PRO Suite and PDF-XChange Editor Plus products within the published price list as of January 11th.
Purchasing the EOCR as an optional ‘addon’ Plugin will subsequently cease on release of version 9 and this product will no longer be available as a separate item in the PDF-XChange Editor or PDF-Tools.
Clients with active maintenance will, as always, be provided with upgrades to their products to ensure they have continued access to the features they currently enjoy without additional cost.
Price increases and product line-up changes will be published and come into effect on January 11th 2021, coinciding with the Version 9 release – any clients with whom you have outstanding quotations and price promises must be registered with us before that date specifically and we will require copies of your correspondence with your clients where such price promises are made – if they are to be honored by us. Please note such prices will only be guaranteed up to January 24th 2021 and after this date no longer can be provided with licenses at pre-increase costs.
We regret we cannot provide you with advance notice of the licenses costs and increases before this date as it would likely prejudice sales prior to that date.
Any questions or concerns can be communicated to us by emailing sales@pdf-xchange.com
During this unprecedented holiday season we hope all of our reseller and partners have a wonderful and safe holiday season all things considering, and look forward to continuing doing business together in the new year as we hope the situation around the world will improve and stabilize in the upcoming year.
We wish the best for us all.
Warm wishes and kind regards,
Tracker Software Products & PDF-XChange Co.