v11.1 [Feb 15, 2018]
- HTML Conversion
ABCpdf now contains a third HTML rendering engine based around Google Chromium (x64 only). This now means that you have a choice of HTML to PDF conversion based around any of the three current mainstream browsers. You can use Chrome style conversion, or Firefox style conversion or Internet Explorer style conversion.
- PDF 2.0 - ISO 32000-2
After a gap of nine years, the PDF 2.0 ISO Specification has finally been released. The previous ISO PDF specification - ISO 32000-1:2008 was released in Spring 2008. The updated PDF 2.0 specification -32000-2:2017 was released in the Summer of 2017. The new specification incorporates a variety of additional Acrobat functions which have been documented by Adobe in extensions to the specification. It deprecates a number of features - most notably the Info metadata section, certain encryption schemes regarded as insecure and the XFA forms architecture used by Adobe Lifecycle. Some new features have been added but there are few of these. The majority of changes have been related to consolidation, correction and clarification.
- Elements
The PDF specification is massive. Simply enormous. So trying to capture the entire of the specification in an object model is a vast task. Yes this is what we have undertaken successfully.
The new Elements namespace covers all the tables in the PDF specification in a structured manner. It is extremely large - more than 300 classes - one for each table in the PDF specifications alll the way up to PDF 2.0. However this type of structured access provides a number of great benefits.
By using this namepace you ensure that you only add properties that exist for the current object. This vastly reduces the risk of introducing bugs - hard to detect bugs.
As you are using this namespace you get intellisense for the different properties that exist on an object. Each property links directly back to the precise page in the PDF Specification that defines it, so it's easy to work out what's going on and what each one is for.
As you run your code through a debugger you can see typed objects with all their properties and you can see how they link to each other. This makes it much easier to understand how a document is structured and how you should write code to analyse or modify it.
- JavaScript Forms & Fields
PDF Forms can contain JavaScript calculations.
Most typically these are used to add field values together. However they can be used for any type of field formatting or calculation.
Previous versions of ABCpdf were not able to run these types of JavaScript calculations which meant that programmatically changing field values could result in calculations being ignored.
- Rendering
The PDF format has long supported 3D objects as well as standard 2D ones. We believe we were the first in the world outside of Adobe to support rendering of these 3D elements.
ABCpdf Version 10 supported U3D (Universal 3D) elements. As part of Version 11 we now also support the PRC (Product Representation Compact) 3D format.
We support 3D export as either WebGL and OBJ and there is a new exporters interface to allow you to easily export to other custom formats.
We support a wide range of palette types for flexible and powerful output of indexed color images in GIF and PNG format. Our indexed color output includes alpha for tiny, yet high-quality, transparent PNG images.
We now support rendering to both 8 and 16 bit grayscale PNG. In addition we also support rendering to progressive JPEG.
