Release of Version 4.1.7

[David King]

I am releasing Version 4.1.7 today, 2 Dec 2024, on an expedited basis to fix a serious bug which I noticed just last week while giving a demo to a friend. The error occurs in prior releases of PDFTK Builder Enhanced when merging or interleaving the pages of two or more PDF documents and any file below the top file in the ‘Join Files” list has more than one page range entered in its Pages box. For those files, the first page range would be taken from the correct file, but additional page ranges would be taken from the top (first) file. For example, if the Pages entry for the second or later file in the list was pages "1-4, 5, 8" (three page ranges), pages 1-4 would be taken from that file, but pages 5 and 8 would be taken (incorrectly) from the top file. Surprisingly, this error appears to have gone undetected and unreported for seven years and thousands of downloads, suggesting that actual impacts of this bug have been minor. Files which had no entry in their Pages box (selects all pages) or just one page range are not affected nor are operations on tabs other than the 'Join Files' tab.

Users are encouraged to update to Version 4.1.7 as soon as possible in order to avoid this bug. In the interim, a workaround for earlier releases is to repeat affected files in the list, including only one page range per Pages entry.

(UPDATE - 8 Dec 2024) Be advised that I have updated the default PdftkBuilder.ini file to switch the default page size in the Numbering section from North American Letter to A4 (ISO) and I have updated the PdftkBuilder-4.1.7.portable.zip download file to swap in the revised .ini file before more downloads occur or are redistributed. If you already downloaded and extracted the program prior to the date of this change, there is no need re-download the .zip file as there were no changes to the program. If you want to swap out the original .ini file for the updated version, you can download the the revised .ini file by itself from the /docs folder on the project Files page or simply reverse the commenting out of the two sets of page size entries by editing the .ini file from the Help menu > Settings (.ini) item in the program. The Numbering settings in the .ini file only matter if you use the 'Number Pages' feature on the 'Mark Pages' tab, in which case the user is expected to edit the settings in the .ini file if needed.