Solid PDF Creator - I don't see my printer driver anymore

Microsoft has some new patches out for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and their various server releases that breaks many printer drivers. Our Solid PDF Creator may have disappeared from your choice of printer after this update.

We have fixed the issue that Microsoft took offence to with printer drivers and have released a new version of Solid PDF Creator on our free PDF Creator website.

For more details on the Microsoft patch:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3170455

Scanners ...TWAIN... WIA...

Question: What is TWAIN and WIA? What does this have to do with Solid Converter v8?

Answer: TWAIN and WIA are standards for communicating with imaging devices - scanners, in our case, and software applications.

"The word 'twain' is an archaic form meaning 'two'. It appears in Kipling's 'The Ballad of East and West' - '... and never the twain shall meet ...', reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry 'Technology Without An Interesting Name' continues to haunt the standard." - from Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

TWAIN drivers are provided by your scanner's manufacturer (Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, etc.). When you run Solid Converter it discovers what TWAIN drivers you have installed so it can talk to your scanning devices.

WIA (Windows Imaging Acquistion) is from Microsoft and is an utility that allows you to scan into any application that supports WIA.

Solid Converter v8 only uses TWAIN as its interface to scanning devices.

If you scanner does not support TWAIN you can use the software supplied with your scanner to scan your paper documents. Save the scanned images as tiff and then create a PDF using Create PDF with Solid Converter.

PDF/A1-b or PDF/A-2b?

Question: Is it recommended to use PDF/A1-b or PDF/A-2b?

Answer: PDF/A-1 is based on PDF version 1.4.  PDF/A-2 is based on the latest PDF standard which supports more functionality and better compression than the older format (compressed object streams and compressed cross reference streams for example). With this in mind, we recommend PDF/A-2b.

What makes it a PDF?

Often people will ask "What is a PDF file?" or "How do you View a PDF File?". These lead to a couple of basic answers.

Read more »

v8 has New User Interface

v8 includes a new and improved user interface where the core tasks are easily available.

Solid PDF Tools v8 User Interface

The v8 rewrite was a conscious shift back to our core features : a focus on document reconstruction functionality. 

Adding new features to the product going forward is prioritized by customer requests so please send your feedback to support@soliddocuments.com.

The v8 rewrite was required to take advantage of 64-bit architectures and multi-core processors. A rewrite using Microsoft .NET was required so that we could engineer the product using our own Solid Framework SDK (unlike the older products which were based on a legacy architecture).

Watch our getting started video.

Where's my Solid Converter PDF printer driver?

If you had a pre-version 8 of Solid Converter PDF or Solid PDF Tools, you know that you would choose Solid Converter PDF (or Solid PDF Tools) when you wanted to create a PDF from the File | Print menu:

Pre-v8 printer driver

With v8 versions of our software we are shipping Solid PDF Creator as the printer driver for PDF creation. File | Print and choose Solid PDF Creator from the printer list:

v8 printer driver

Please note that Solid PDF Creator is pre-unlocked. When you purchase Solid Converter v8 or Solid PDF Tools v8, Solid PDF Creator is ready to use. File | Print | and select Solid PDF Creator and get creating PDFs.