We offer different kinds of support for all products. Here is a summary:

Paid support is available on an annual basis, and includes ongoing technical support, plus access to all minor and major updates. In addition, there are several long-time guarantees regarding product and support availability. Paid support is your insurance for PDFlib GmbH products: if there’s a problem, we will take care of it.

Premium support is an extension of paid support with even shorter response times. Premium support is only available for premium licenses (i.e. licenses with extended rights).

Standard support is included with all product licenses. It covers many items of paid support, but only on a voluntary basis. Problems of customers with a support contract always have priority over cases opened by customers with standard support. Updates are not included, and response times may be longer for standard support than for paid support.

Details of support services are available on an extra page.

Please remember the following when opening a support case:

Bug reports will only be accepted if the latest maintenance release
of the respective product line is used. If a problem cannot be reproduced
with the latest available maintenance release, but only earlier
versions, the case will be closed. For example, a bug report in
version 7.0.0 will not be accepted if the bug has been fixed in the
maintenance release 7.0.1.

Send a problem description which is as specific as possible, and include sample input data which may be required to reproduce the problem. Sometimes a runtime trace may be required (the PDFlib support team will send instructions in this case). We guarantee full confidentiality within PDFlib GmbH for all data supplied with support cases.

Include your license key in the inquiry.

The product APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) will never be incompatibly changed from one major release to the next. However, API entries marked as »deprecated« may be removed in the next major release after the release where they have been marked for the first time. Usage patterns which violate the documented rules and restrictions are not guaranteed to work in the next minor or major release, even if they are tolerated by an earlier version.

Support cases will only be accepted during the lifetime of a product.
Support ends with the release of the second major version after the
licensed version, plus one year. Support contracts can be renewed
until the end of a product’s lifetime; they must be updated to a newer
version thereafter. Example: the lifetime of PDFlib 5 ends 10/2007;
the lifetime of PDFlib 6 ends at the release of PDFlib 8 plus one year.

A platform is a combination of operating system and one or more
hardware architectures. Fully compatible versions of system and/or
hardware comprise the same platform, but for Mac OS X and Windows
server and desktop versions are considered different platforms.
Examples:
Windows 2000/XP (excluding Server 2000/2003) is a platform;
Apple Mac OS X Server for both PPC and Intel is a platform.

A product comprises one of the software offerings of PDFlib GmbH
for a particular platform.
Examples: PDFlib 7 for Windows Server 2000/2003, PDFlib+PDI 7 for
Linux on x86, PPS 7 for Solaris on x86 or sparc, TET 2 for HP-UX.

A major version is a new version of a product with significantly
enhanced functionality. Examples: PDFlib 7, TET 3

A minor or maintenance  release is a new version of a product which
does not add significant functionality, but fixes bugs, updates the
software to new versions of operating systems, programming environments,
etc. Maintenance releases usually contain dozens of
enhancements, and are explicitly designated as such.
Example: PDFlib 7.0.1 is a maintenance release for PDFlib 7.0.0.

A patchlevel is a modified maintenance release which fixes a particular
problem or small number of problems. Usually patchlevels are
provided to customers who reported a particular problem, and
require a short-term solution. Patchlevel releases are generally not
publicly available.
Example: PDFlib 7.0.0p2 is a patchlevel for PDFlib 7.0.0

A product line comprises a particular major release and all corresponding
minor releases (maintenance updates).
Example: the PDFlib 7 product line includes PDFlib 7.0.0, 7.0.1, etc.

An update changes an existing license for a product to a license for
a newer major version of the same product on the same platform.
Example: change from PDFlib 6 to PDFlib 7.

An upgrade changes an existing license for a product to the same
major version of another product which is a superset of the first.
Examples: change from PDFlib 7 to PDFlib+PDI 7, or from
PDFlib+PDI to PPS 7.

A bug is any deviation from the documented behavior, PDF output
which is rejected by Adobe Acrobat, or a crash of a product, provided
suitable input has been provided to the product, and all documented
programming conditions have been honored. Note that
PDFlib products often throw exceptions to alert the user to a particular
problem; according to standard programming practise client
code must handle exceptions and react appropriately.
Example: a certain JPEG image is not properly converted to PDF
although it should be supported according to the documentation.

A binding is a particular platform version of a programming language
environment supported by a product. Examples: PHP 5.1.1 on
Linux, Java 1.4 on Windows, .NET 2.0 on Windows

A build of a particular product is a set of binaries required to use the
product on a particular platform with one or more of the supported
language bindings. A new build is always based on the latest maintenance release and patchlevel of the product.