Support
It’s free. It stays free.
No paid tier, no trial that runs out, and nothing quietly switched off waiting for your card. If you never give me a penny you’ll have exactly the same program as everybody else.
It does cost something to make, though. If Emifyn has saved you a subscription and you’d like to put something in the tin, here’s what it would go towards, in the order it’d get spent.
One-off, any amount
Chip in
No account to make, no subscription, nothing recurring unless you choose it yourself.
This is a gift rather than a purchase. It doesn’t buy support, or a place at the front of the queue, or a say in what gets built next. It’d be a bit dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Where it goes
Three things, in this order.
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A code-signing certificate, about £250 a year. This is the big one. At the moment every single person who downloads Emifyn meets a full-screen warning telling them Windows protected their PC, and a certificate is the only thing that makes that go away. It isn’t a one-off either: it renews every year and needs a hardware key to go with it. It’s the first thing I’d spend anything on, and honestly it’s why this page exists.
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A second machine to test on. Emifyn gets built and tested on one PC. Anything that only goes wrong on a different version of Windows, at a different screen scaling, with a different set of fonts installed, I currently find out about when somebody tells me.
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Time. Converting, OCR, forms, signatures and batch jobs are what’s left to build, and they happen in evenings and at weekends. None of this is anybody’s day job.
Costs nothing
Three ways to help that are worth more than money.
The first one especially, and I do mean that.
Most useful
Send me a PDF that breaks it
Every test Emifyn has passed so far uses documents I made specifically to trip it up. It has never once been shown a real file from the wild that misbehaves: a battered scan, a locked form from 2004, something a printer produced years ago that no reader has ever been happy with.
If you’ve got one of those, it’s worth more to me than anything else on this page. Only send things you’re free to share, obviously.
Second most
Tell me what went wrong
Open Help → About and press Copy details. That puts the version and everything underneath it on your clipboard in one go. Paste that in along with what you were doing and what happened instead.
Also lovely
Mention it to someone
Most people have no idea you can change the actual text in a PDF without paying monthly for the privilege. If you know somebody shelling out for exactly that, say something.
And no, you won’t get nagged
The program won’t pester you, count down at you, or ask again once you’ve said no. There’s one Donate link in the About window and there’s this page. That’s the whole of it.