v1.17.9

iwo Helper Desktop v1.17.9

Added

• A start screen with two sections. The hub now asks for a section first — PDF or
  Other tools — and shows the tools inside it. The window keeps one size on every screen so
  it never jumps, Esc and a “Back” button in the header return to the top, and “Home” inside a
  tool comes back to its own section rather than the top screen, so hopping between PDF tools
  still costs one click. Dropping PDFs onto the “PDF” card carries them inside: the header says
  how many files are waiting and the next tool you pick opens with them.
• “More operations” — a window of its own (PDF section). Six actions over a single document
  that until now hid in a “More actions” menu inside Split, where nobody found them: compress,
  convert to grayscale, repair a damaged file, save pages as images, extract the text to a
  .txt, edit the document properties. Split keeps a one-click bridge that hands the open
  document over, so nothing has to be opened twice.
• Merge hands its result on. “☰ Menu → More operations” continues the work on the file you
  have just saved — compress it, drop the colour, fix its properties — without hunting for it on
  disk. Split has the same bridge for the document it has open, and both open the window even
  when there is nothing to hand over yet: an entry that answers a click with an explanation of
  why it does nothing reads as broken. PDF → Word deliberately has no bridge: it cannot name a
  single PDF, its sources are many and its result is a .docx.
• Compressing a single file is a real operation at last. Until now compression only existed
  as an afterthought of merging and splitting. It writes a copy — sources are never modified —
  and if the file is already optimized it says so instead of silently returning the same bytes.
• The user guide ships inside the program. “About” has a new line, “User guide: open”, which
  unpacks the document next to the settings and opens it. It works in the portable build too and
  needs no internet, which is the whole point of an offline app.
• The full-size preview can be minimized. The minimize box and a taskbar button of its own
  come as a pair: the preview is modal, so a minimized window without a taskbar button could not
  have been brought back at all.

Changed

• “◀ Earlier” / “Later ▶” became “◀ Move left” / “Move right ▶”. A bare “Earlier” on a button
  reads as “in the past”, not as an action. The grid is horizontal, the arrows are on the buttons
  and the shortcuts are Alt+←/→, so the axis is what the eye follows. The tooltip stays ordinal
  — “move the page one position earlier” — because at a row wrap “to the left” stops being true.

• “Excel Digest” is now “Merge Excel”, in a pair with “Merge PDF”. The result is still
  called a digest: a digest is what merging workbooks produces.

• The language globe sits where the eye looks for it — centred against the title and the
  subtitle instead of hanging above them. The position is computed from the real font heights,
  so it stays centred at any display scale.

• “Document properties” was laid out again. The buttons overlapped the last field by a pixel
  and the fields had three pixels between groups: the layout was computed from literals, while
  WinForms sizes a single-line text box by its font and ignores the height you set. Everything is
  measured now, the window says which file it edits, and it states that an empty field clears the
  property.

• A card's contents stand in the middle of it. The icon, the title and the description were
  pinned to the top of the card, so a short description left an empty strip at the bottom and the
  card looked unfinished. The block is measured and centred now, with both texts laid out by the
  same rules they are drawn with.

• Buttons say when they cannot be pressed. An unavailable ordinary button used to differ
  from a working one by the colour of its caption alone, and in panels where half the buttons
  wait for an open document that had to be found out by clicking. It is filled now, so the state
  reads at a glance. The corner radius follows the height by one formula instead of a step at
  36 px, the focus ring is solid rather than translucent so keyboard users can see where they
  are, and a long caption is now cut with an ellipsis before it reaches the rounded corner. The
  zoom bar of the full-size preview was the only place with square buttons and colours of its
  own — it uses the same button as the rest of the app, in a variant for a dark background.

Fixed

• The page in the full-size preview no longer hides in the grey. Its position was computed in
  the window's coordinates while the viewport was scrolled — WinForms keeps a child control in
  content coordinates, so the origin drifted by the scroll on every zoom step and accumulated.
  Enlarging or maximizing the window did not re-centre the page at all, and a stale scrollable
  area left phantom scrollbars behind. All three are fixed, and the centring maths moved into a
  pure function under unit tests.
• The language chosen in the installer reaches the program on a reinstall. Setup used to
  write the language straight into settings.txt and only when that file did not exist yet, so
  choosing English over an existing Russian installation changed nothing. It now hands the choice
  over in a separate one-line file that the program applies once at startup and removes. Setup
  never touches settings.txt, which is what protected the non-ASCII paths inside it.
• Ghostscript reporting success on a file it could not read. On a password-protected document
  the engine exits with zero and still leaves a valid-looking two-kilobyte stub, which passed both
  replacement policies: “Repair a damaged PDF” and “Convert to grayscale” answered with a green
  “Done” and an empty document. The engine's own error marker in its error stream is what counts
  now, not the exit code.
• The preview's zoom bar at display scales above 100 %. The window is deliberately not
  auto-scaled (its size is measured in physical pixels), so the bar stayed in fixed pixels while
  the font grew with the screen: at 150 % every caption on it was clipped. The bar is measured
  from the current scale now, and the window's minimum size comes from the bar's real width — the
  “Print” button used to sit outside a window squeezed to its minimum.
• “Check for updates” no longer swallows a browser that will not start. Answering “Yes” to
  the new-version question opened the release page and, if the system had no browser to open it
  with, did nothing at all — the failure was caught and dropped. The address is shown now, so the
  page can be reached by hand.
• Two button captions were being cut with an ellipsis. Split's “More operations” read “More
  opera…” — the right-hand panel was 16 px too narrow, and it cannot grow downwards, since at the
  window's minimum height a second row of buttons lands on the bottom strip. The panel is wider
  now. The other one had shipped: the “Move after page N…” dialog sized its buttons by a constant
  that was measured in the window's font, while the primary button is set larger and bold, so
  “Переместить” needed 120 px in a 112 px button. Both buttons of that dialog are measured in
  their own font now and grow with the caption. A test opens every window and every dialog and
  fails on any caption that does not fit — clipping is silent, and the eye does not audit fifty
  buttons.
• Gaps between the buttons of the right-hand panels differed between Merge and PDF → Word. They
  follow one rhythm now.

Documentation

• The user guide matches the program again (docs/Инструкция пользователя.docx, also shipped
  inside the exe). All 26 figures are fresh captures of the real 1.17.9 windows: the two-level
  start screen, the “More operations” window and its resolution menu are new, and the “More
  actions” menu that no longer exists is gone. The text follows: five tools instead of four, the
  chapter order of the start screen (PDF first, Excel behind it), a chapter of its own for “More
  operations”, the renamed buttons, and the new lines in About and in the troubleshooting table.
  The build now also checks that every caption the guide quotes actually exists in the program's
  catalog — it is what caught “Раньше”, “Позже”, “Доп. действия” and “Свод Excel”.

Files: iwoHelperDesktop-1.17.9.exe / iwoHelperDesktop-1.17.9-x86.exe - portable (single file, 64-bit / 32-bit); iwoHelperDesktop-setup-1.17.9.exe / iwoHelperDesktop-setup-1.17.9-x86.exe - installers with bundled Ghostscript (per-user install, no administrator rights). Take x64 unless your Windows is 32-bit.