Working with hot folders in pdfToolbox Server

Previous articles of this manual talked about Profiles (Profiles: the corner stone of pdfToolbox) and Process Plans (Process Plans: when Profiles are not enough), but only on how to run those manually on PDF documents you open in pdfToolbox Desktop. Of course there are  times where it is more efficient to process PDF documents automatically – and this article describes how to do that using hot folders in pdfToolbox Server.

pdfToolbox Server is one of the automatic flavors of the pdfToolbox product family. It is capable of handling any number of jobs; each job is a hot folder setup with an input folder and one or more output folders. PDF documents dropped into an input folder are picked up and processed automatically.

Launching the pdfToolbox Server user interface

pdfToolbox Server doesn't have its own user interface; instead it can be controlled through pdfToolbox Desktop. To launch it:

  1. Launch pdfToolbox Desktop.
  2. Click the "Tools" > "Server" menu item.

The pdfToolbox Server control panel appears:

pdfToolbox Server can be started in different modes:

  1. Start a Server
    Use "Start a Server" to launch pdfToolbox Server on the same machine as pdfToolbox Desktop.
  2. Connect with Remote Server
    Use "Connect with Remote Server" to connect to a pdfToolbox Server instance that is already running either on the same machine or on a different machine on the network. This allows remote monitoring and configuration over the network. You will need to know the IP address of the machine running pdfToolbox Server.
  3. Start a Dispatcher and Start a Satellite
    With pdfToolbox Server, tasks can be distributed via a dispatcher in the network to one or more satellites, which receive the tasks, process them and send them back to the dispatcher. The dispatcher controls which tasks are to be processed by which satellite. Read more about this topic in the online documentation under the chapter: Distributed Processing.

All other information relating to working with hot folders can be found in the online documentation unter the chapter: Server.