Release notes

NMTeches is now ElixTechs

• New name, new address. PDF Studio is now published by ElixTechs, formerly NMTeches. The website is now pdfstudio.elixtechs.com, and the licence server is pdfstudio-licence.elixtechs.com.
• Your licence carries on. Your licence key, seats and activation stay as they are. There is nothing to enter again, and no PC needs to be activated again.
• Update every PC to keep activating. Version 1.2 and earlier still use the old nmteches.com addresses. Once those addresses are switched off, earlier versions cannot activate or renew their activation, and they stop working when the current activation runs out. Install 1.3.0 on every PC before then. IT departments should allow pdfstudio-licence.elixtechs.com, pdfstudio.elixtechs.com and s3.elixtechs.com.
• A new look. ElixTechs colours, square corners and a new icon, in light and dark themes. The Start menu and desktop shortcuts are now called *PDF Studio by ElixTechs*, and the old shortcuts are removed when you update.

Improved

• Edit Text and Find handle Arabic properly. Arabic words are found and replaced as whole words. This includes words next to numbers and PDFs that store lam-alef the other way round. A longer replacement no longer fails to fit, and it keeps the original size and line position.
• Highlights. The Highlights list also finds text highlighted in Word and saved as PDF. Open it from View › Highlighted Text, with Ctrl+Shift+H, or by right-clicking a page. *Copy all* copies the listed text with page numbers and notes.
• Arabic interface. Every Arabic label was reviewed for clearer, more consistent wording. Page numbers can now be written in Arabic (صفحة 1 or صفحة 1 من 10). Wrapped right-to-left text no longer loses its first letter.

New

• Arabic interface. PDF Studio now speaks Arabic, laid out right to left. It follows the Windows display language, or choose it in Settings › General › Language.
• Updates in one step. The home screen tells you when a new version is out, with what changed. If PDF Studio was installed with the setup, *Install and restart* downloads it, checks it, and installs it. When only the app has changed, the download is much smaller. Help › Check for Updates checks straight away.
• Progress and Stop. Long jobs such as OCR, PDF to Word, compressing and redacting show how far they have got, what they are doing and roughly how long is left. *Stop* ends a job at the next page without leaving a half-finished file behind.
• Undo. The message after a tool finishes, after saving in Edit PDF, and after a quick action in the viewer has an *Undo* button. It moves the new file to the Recycle Bin.
• Find a tool or command (Ctrl+K). Type what you want to do, such as *compress* or *sign*, and press Enter. It also finds pages, open documents and actions such as switching the theme.
• Select text in the viewer. Drag across the words, then right-click to copy, highlight or search for them. Right-click a page to rotate, extract or delete it.
• Drop files where you want them. Drop a file on a tool on the home screen to open that tool with it, or drop PDFs anywhere in the window to open them.
• Getting started. On first use, the home screen offers three ways in: open a PDF, scan a document, or find a tool. It also offers to make PDF Studio the app that opens PDF files.
• Error reports, if you agree. If something goes wrong, PDF Studio asks once whether to send error reports. File names, folder paths and names are removed from them first. You can change this in Settings.

Improved

• A smaller install. The built-in OCR engine now downloads the first time OCR needs it (about 29 MB), and parts of the document engine that no tool used were removed. For PCs that are never online, the OCR pack is on the download page.
• Saving in Edit PDF no longer leaves in-between copies next to the result.
• Buttons shown only as icons now have names for screen readers, and keyboard focus is clearly visible.
• IT departments can turn off the update check and error reports for every user of a PC by policy.

New

• Highlight text. In Edit PDF, pick the highlighter and drag across the words you want to mark. The highlight snaps to the text and is saved as a real PDF highlight, which other PDF apps recognise too. Change its colour or remove it before saving.
• Find highlighted text. The Highlights button in the viewer lists every highlight, underline and strikethrough in a document, with the words under it and any note. Type to filter the list, and pick one to jump to it on the page.
• OCR for documents in more than one language. OCR PDF has a new choice, *Several languages*: tick the languages the document uses, for example Arabic and English, and every page is read with all of them at once. *Detect automatically* now also recognises pages that mix languages. Arabic OCR needs the free OCR upgrade in Settings.

Improved

• PDF Studio opens maximized to fill the screen, and afterwards the way you left it.
• Saving from Edit PDF keeps a document's existing highlights as highlights.

New

• Rebuilt as a native Windows application. PDF Studio no longer carries a web browser engine inside it. The download is about half the size (the x64 setup is 112 MB, down from 214 MB) and it takes about 345 MB on disk instead of 630 MB.
• The tools, the document engine and the results they produce are unchanged.

Upgrading

• Install 1.1.0 over your current version. Your licence key and activation, settings, history, presets and saved signatures are kept, and every PDF Studio 1.x licence key works with 1.1.0.
• Upgrade with the same kind of package you installed: the setup (.exe) upgrades a copy installed by the setup, the .msi upgrades a copy installed from the MSI.

Licensing

• Clearer licence terms. The End User Licence Agreement now names NMTeches as the licensor and sets out how activation works, including our commitment for the licence service: it stays available for every supported version, and if it were ever to stop for a version you hold a perpetual licence to, you get at least 90 days' notice and a free way to keep your copies working first.
• The document engine is published as free software. PDF Studio's PDF engine is licensed under the GNU AGPL (version 3 or later), with its complete source code, licence text and a full list of components installed in the source folder. The desktop application remains licensed under the agreement.

Improved

• The sidebar shows © NMTeches, and the About box's open-source notices explain both licences.

New

• A new look that matches the app icon. Warm cream and coral in light mode, a deep cocoa in dark mode, rounder controls and the NMTeches typefaces. PDF Studio now follows your Windows light or dark setting until you choose one.
• Works behind corporate proxies and TLS inspection. The licence check now uses the Windows proxy settings (including PAC files) and the Windows certificate store, the same as your browser.
• Release this PC's seat on computers where IT deployed the key for all users: Settings ▸ Licence. The seat is freed straight away, ready for another computer.
• Log files for support. Help ▸ Open the Log Folder now holds main.log, with the app's and the PDF engine's messages. Licence keys are never written to it.

Improved

• The Tools menu and the welcome tour no longer quote an out-of-date tool count, and ten more tools — Edit Text, Comment & Mark Up, Attachments, Bates Numbering, Create Form Fields, Form Calculations, Create Portfolio, Layers, Check Accessibility and Tag for Screen Readers — can now be included in or left out of a tailored licence.
• Notifications and confirmation dialogs follow the light theme instead of staying dark.
• Settings ▸ Licence says exactly what the licence check sends.

New

• Choose your download. Every release now comes as a setup wizard (.exe), an MSI package for Group Policy, Intune and SCCM, and a portable ZIP that runs without installing.
• Native ARM64 builds for Windows 11 on ARM PCs such as Surface Pro and Snapdragon laptops, beside the x64 builds.
• Help ▸ Release Notes opens the notes for the version you are running.

Notes

• The MSI installs for all users; deploy the licence key to %ProgramData%\PDF Studio\license.key.
• 32-bit Windows is not supported: the OCR engine has no 32-bit build.

New

• PDF Studio by NMTeches. New name, icon and taskbar identity.
• A full menu bar: File, Edit, View, Tools, Window and Help, with keyboard shortcuts for every tool.
• Help menu: the user guide (F1), replay the welcome tour, check for updates, contact support, licence and activation, and About PDF Studio.