XMLmind logoCompany | Contact | Site Map
 
 

Version 4.3.2_01 (March 8, 2010)

All changes are found in XMLmind XSL Utility, that is, nothing has changed in xfc.jar (JavaTM version) and in xfc.dll (.NET version).

Enhancements:

  • Upgraded XMLmind DITA Converter (ditac) to version 1.2. Ditac v1.2 allows to convert DITA documents to EPUB (standard e-book format). It also contain fixes for a few minor bugs.
  • Upgraded the JEuclid image toolkit plug-in to version 3.1.9.
  • Upgraded the DocBook XSL stylesheets to version 1.75.2.

Incompatibilities:

  • Though not mandated by the DITA standard, XMLmind XSL Utility now checks that all the topics which compose the document to be converted have distinct IDs. If this is not the case, a fatal error is reported.
  • The qualified ID of a descendant element of a DITA topic is now transformed as follows: topicID/descendantID becomes topicID__descendantID in the generated content. (The separator string being used comprises two underscore characters.) Previously, it was topicID__-__descendantID, which was longer and less readable.

Version 4.3.2 (December 4, 2009)

All changes are found in XMLmind XSL Utility, that is, nothing has changed in xfc.jar (JavaTM version) and in xfc.dll (.NET version).

Enhancements:

  • XMLmind DITA Converter v1.1.0_02 (ditac) is now integrated in XMLmind XSL Utility.

    Using XMLmind XSL Utility, you can now convert DITA 1.1 topics and maps to production-quality XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.1, JavaTM Help, HTML Help, Eclipse Help, PDF, PostScript®, RTF (can be opened in Word 2000+), WordprocessingML (can be opened in Word 2003+), Office Open XML (.docx, can be opened in Word 2007+), OpenOffice (.odt, can be opened in OpenOffice.org 2+).

    Unlike ditac, a command-line utility, XMLmind XSL Utility is a graphical tool which makes it easy parameterizing the DITA conversion process.

  • The Conversion specification combobox has been replaced by a better organized, less cluttered, popup menu.
  • Added a "Restore stock conversion specifications" button in Preferences, General section, which allows to restore all the stock conversion specifications.
  • Added a "Helper Applications" section to the dialog box displayed by clicking Preferences.

    This allows to specify the locations of respectively, jhindex and hhc.exe, two external tools, which are needed to convert DITA documents to respectively, JavaTM Help and HTML Help.

  • The conversion specifications modified or created by the user are now saved using a safer, more perennial, scheme, which has been designed to better cope with XMLmind XSL Utility upgrades.
  • On Windows, XMLmind XSL Utility now detects the case where the file generated by clicking the Convert button (e.g. MyBook.pdf) is already opened in another application (e.g. Adobe® Reader®).

    This case caused the conversion process to fail during its last step. This case is now detected at the very beginning of the conversion process. The user is then informed that she/he might need to close the file in the other application before proceeding with the conversion.

  • Unlike XMLmind XSL-FO Converter and Apache FOP, RenderX XEP is just pre-installed in XMLmind XSL Utility. The first time you'll try to use this commercial XSL-FO processor, you'll be prompted to finish its installation inside XMLmind XSL Utility.

    On Windows, XMLmind XSL Utility now detects the case where you may not finish this installation due to insufficient privileges. This typically happens on Vista when you install XMLmind XSL Utility in C:\Program Files\. In such case, a dialog box is displayed informing you how to run xep_finish_install.bat as an administrator.

Bug fixes:

  • On 64-bit Windows, xslutil.exe failed to find any installed 64-bit JavaTM runtime.

Incompatibilities:

  • All the modifications you have made to the stock conversion specifications of XMLmind XSL Utility v4.3.1 will be lost. Of course, all the original conversion specifications you have personally created will be preserved.
  • All the stock conversion specifications which did not produce self-contained deliverables are no longer available.

    For example, the conversion specification called dbToHTML is no longer available. This conversion specification required the user to copy by hand all the image files referenced by the HTML pages.

  • The stock conversion specifications operating on Slides documents are no longer available.

Version 4.3.1 (April 21, 2009)

Bug fixes:

  • A build bug prevented XMLmind XSL-FO Converter .NET version from running on Windows 64-bit.

Version 4.3 (January 20, 2009)

License and price changes:

  • New, affordable, Desktop Edition, which unlike the other editions which target the developer, is aimed at the end user.
  • More liberal Developer License.
  • Lower prices in case of purchase renewal.

Enhancements:

  • XMLmind XSL Utility, a graphical tool allowing to convert XML documents to a variety of formats (PDF, PostScript®, HTML, HTML Help, Java Help, Eclipse Help, RTF, WordprocessingML, Office Open XML and OpenOffice, etc), has been completely rewritten to make use of the add-on architecture of XMLmind XML Editor.

    In practice, this means that XMLmind XSL Utility now:

    • Allows, out of the box, to convert DocBook 4, DocBook 5, Simplified DocBook, DocBook Slides and XHTML documents to PDF, RTF, WordprocessingML, Office Open XML and OpenOffice formats.
    • Supports XSLT 2 style sheets (Saxon 9) as well as XSLT 1 style sheets (Saxon 6).
    • Better support of XML input documents making use of XInclude.
    • Integrates RenderX XEP in addition to XMLmind XSL-FO Converter 4.3 and Apache FOP 0.95.
    • Its Preferences dialog box allows to specify which custom TrueType (.ttf) fonts are to be embedded in the PDF files generated by FOP and XEP.
    • Looks nicer.
    • Better integration with Mac OS X.
    • May also be used as a command-line tool.
  • More comprehensive User's Guide, now explaining how to integrate the XMLmind XSL-FO Converter engine in your JavaTM or .NET application.

Bug fixes:

  • A fo:basic-link containing anything other than text and inline-level objects caused XMLmind XSL-FO Converter to raise a NullPointerException.

    Moreover this limitation was not documented.

  • When its input was specified as an URI, the .NET XmlMind.FoConverter.Converter class did not close the XmlTextReader it created.

Incompatibilities:

  • Personal Edition now automatically adds a small, non obtrusive, "Created by XMLmind XSL-FO Converter" stamp at the bottom of the footer (if any) of each page.
  • On the other hand, the xfc.jar (JavaTM version) and xfc.dll (.NET versions) libraries of Personal Edition are no longer obfuscated.

    This allows to evaluate the integration of the XMLmind XSL-FO Converter engine in your application simply by using the xfc.jar or xfc.dll library found in the distribution of Personal Edition.

  • The JavaTM version of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter now requires a JavaTM runtime version 1.4 and above to compile and run.

    Note that XMLmind XSL Utility now requires a JavaTM runtime version 1.5 and above to run.

  • The .NET version of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter now requires a .NET framework version 2.0 and above to compile and run.
  • XMLmind XSL Utility (an end-user graphical tool) and the XMLmind XSL-FO Converter SDK (command-line tools, technical documentation, class library) are now available as separate distributions.

    Both distributions are self-contained.

    Both distributions are only available as .zip archives, which should work fine on any JavaTM 1.5+ platform. This means that installing the product simply means unzipping the distribution somewhere, and that uninstalling the product simply means deleting the directory created by unzipping the distribution.

  • The user preferences of the XMLmind XSL-FO Converter command-line tools are now stored in user_preferences_dir/xfc.properties.

    The user preferences of XMLmind XSL Utility are now stored in various files found in user_preferences_dir/.

    Directory user_preferences_dir/ is:

    • $HOME/.xfc/ on Linux.
    • $HOME/Library/Application Support/XMLmind/FOConverter/ on the Mac.
    • %APPDATA%\XMLmind\FOConverter\ on Windows 2000, XP, Vista.

      Example: C:\Documents and Settings\john\Application Data\XMLmind\FOConverter\ on Windows 2000 and XP. C:\Users\john\AppData\Roaming\XMLmind\FOConverter\ on Windows Vista.

Version 4.2p1 (02/22/2008)

Bug fixes

  • Unsupported XSL-FO extensions were not handled properly, possibly resulting in a NullPointerException. (This bug was introduced in version 4.2.)

Bug fixes (RTF)

  • Right border on table cells spanning multiple columns was not handled properly, possibly resulting in a missing border.

  • Implicit empty cells in a nested table would result in invalid RTF output.

Bug fixes (WML)

  • Right border on table cells spanning multiple columns was not handled properly, possibly resulting in a missing border.

  • Characters '-' and '.' in id property values would possibly result in invalid hyperlink targets. (These characters cannot be used in bookmark names as MS-Word replaces them with character '_' while leaving hyperlink targets unchanged.)

  • Footnote body was lost if the id property was set on the inline child of the footnote object.

Bug fixes (OOXML)

  • Characters '-' and '.' in id property values would possibly result in invalid hyperlink targets. (These characters cannot be used in bookmark names as MS-Word replaces them with character '_' while leaving hyperlink targets unchanged.)

Version 4.2 (12/13/2007)

New features

  • XSL-FO extension to generate structured document tags (SDTs) in an Office Open XML document.

Bug fixes (WML)

  • Character '>' was not escaped in string "]]>", resulting in invalid XML content.

Bug fixes (OOXML)

  • Character '>' was not escaped in string "]]>", resulting in invalid XML content.

  • Page number format was not properly specified in section properties.

Bug fixes (OpenDocument)

  • Character '>' was not escaped in string "]]>", resulting in invalid XML content.

  • Images in headers/footers did not show in OpenOffice, due to missing namespace declarations in file styles.xml.

XSL Utility

  • Use of XML catalogs for resolution of URIs in XSLT stylesheets.

Version 4.1 (08/23/2007)

Enhancements

  • Support of image viewport.

  • New property imageResolution to specify source image resolution.

  • New property prescaleImages to specify image scaling policy.

Version 4.0 (06/05/2007)

New license terms (Personal Edition).

New features

  • Support of Open XML as alternate output format.

Enhancements

  • New property singleSidedLayout to force single-sided page layout.

XSL Utility

  • Upgraded FOP to version 0.93.

  • Upgraded DocBook-XSL to version 1.71.1.

  • Added DTD for DocBook v4.5.

Version 3.1 (01/18/2007)

New licensing scheme (Professional Edition).

Enhancements

  • Improved automatic table layout provides better handling of very long words in table cells.

Bug fixes (RTF)

  • Images did not show up in MS-Word 2007. (Not a bug actually, but rather a flaw in the RTF loader of Office 2007.)

Bug fixes (RTF/WML)

  • All bookmarks supposed to be set on a list item were lost along the way, which would possibly result in broken links in the output document.

Version 3.0p1 (10/18/2006)

New licensing scheme (Professional Edition).

Enhancements

  • Improved automatic table layout provides better handling of very long words in table cells.

Bug fixes (RTF)

  • Images did not show up in MS-Word 2007. (Not a bug actually, but rather a flaw in the RTF loader of Office 2007.)

Bug fixes (RTF/WML)

  • All bookmarks supposed to be set on a list item were lost along the way, which would possibly result in broken links in the output document.

Version 3.0 (09/29/2006)

New features

  • Support of OpenDocument as alternate output format.

Version 2.3p1 (03/28/2006)

Bug fixes

  • A table in a list item inside a table cell would not be handled properly, resulting in incorrect RTF/WML output.

  • Some particular page sequence definitions would result in missing header/footer on even pages. (This happened for instance when converting a DocBook document with recent versions of DocBook-XSL, unless the double.sided parameter was set to '1'.)

XSL Utility

  • Fixed a bug in xslutil: conversion to RTF/WML would possibly fail when the input file was specified as a relative path name.

  • Added DTD for DocBook v4.4.

  • Upgraded DocBook-XSL to version 1.69.1.

Version 2.3 (03/02/2006)

First .NET version.

Enhancements

  • Revised and extended API (Professional Edition).

Bug fixes

  • Characters U+00AD (soft hyphen) and U+2011 (non-breaking hyphen) were not handled properly.

Bug fixes (RTF)

  • The font table writing did not strictly conform to the RTF specification. This syntax error would make RTF documents unreadable by TextEdit and possibly other Mac OS X applications.

XSL Utility

  • Upgrade of Saxon to version 6.5.4.

  • New transformation XHTML to RTF (XSLT stylesheet by Antenna House).

Version 2.2p1 (09/20/2005)

Enhancements

  • Better handling of white space at the beginning/end of a paragraph.

  • Fixed issue with characters '-' and '.' in id property values. (The RTF loader of MS-Word replaces these characters with '_' (underscore) in bookmark names.)

Bug fixes

  • List item labels containing non-textual objects (e.g. images) were not handled properly. (This bug was introduced with version 2.1.)

  • The body of a footnote was ignored if the footnote element was a child of another inline-level element.

  • Bad shorthand property values (e.g. border="1") would possibly result in a ClassCastException.

Version 2.2 (05/25/2005)

Enhancements

  • Use of expressions for property values specification is now supported.

  • The header and footer offsets (RTF \headery and \footery control words) are now set according to the page master margin-top and margin-bottom property values.

Bug fixes (RTF)

  • Failure to access the URL (src property value) of an external-graphic object would possibly result in a NullPointerException. (This bug affects version 2.1 only.)

  • Setting the space-before property on a nested table would result in invalid RTF output.

XSL Utility

  • Upgrade of DocBook-XSL to version 1.68.1.

Version 2.1 (03/18/2005)

Enhancements

  • Support of nested tables.

  • Automatic switch to the fixed table layout when all column widths are specified.

Bug fixes (RTF)

  • The charset encoder used to determine if a given character can be represented in the output encoding was a class variable, which could possibly cause an IllegalStateException in a multi-threaded environment.

Bug fixes (WML)

  • XML special characters (e.g. '&') were not escaped in the w:dest attribute values.

Version 2.0 (10/20/2004)

New features

  • Support of WML as alternate output format.

Bug fixes

  • When a block contained character data followed by a table, the character data before the table would end up inside the first cell of the table.

  • Values of some compound properties (e.g. border-separation) were not properly evaluated.

Version 1.3 (05/28/2004)

New features

  • Support of multiple page layouts (e.g. different headers and/or footers on left and right pages).

Enhancements

  • Support of justified text in the body of list items.

Bug fixes

  • XFC would occasionally hang while processing an external-graphic object in some particular environments (e.g. on Windows platforms with JRE 1.3).

  • The margin-left and margin-right properties were not considered in the computation of text indents.

XSL Utility

  • Upgrade of DocBook-XSL to version 1.65.1.

  • The Jimi image library is now included in the distribution.

Version 1.2 (12/03/2003)

Enhancements

  • Support of the proportional-column-width function.

  • Support of the text-align property on the table-and-caption element.

  • Support of the keep-with-next property on table rows (MS-Word compatible implementation).

  • Handling of vertical space before a table. (Implemented by means of an empty paragraph.)

  • Use of the RTF Unicode control word (\u) for characters that cannot be represented in the output encoding. (Requires JRE 1.4+.)

Bug fixes

  • A bookmark (id property) attached to the last block of a document was lost if the block contained no character data.

  • Particular values of the border, border-top, border-bottom, border-left and border-right property (e.g. border-top="solid") would cause a NullPointerException. (Was supposed to be fixed since version 1.0p1.)

  • A list-item-body element with a list-block as its first child was not handled properly, resulting in weird paragraph layout.

XSL Utility

  • Upgrade of DocBook-XSL to version 1.62.0.

  • Drag & Drop support enhancement.

  • Command-line utility for batch processing.

Version 1.1 (03/19/2003)

New features

  • Support of page references (page-number-citation element).

  • Partial support of leaders (leader element).

  • Support of hypertext links (external-destination and internal-destination properties).

  • New image converter based on the Java Image I/O library.

  • New Java property rtf.target.

Bug fixes

  • Paragraph attributes were not reset inside an empty table cell, resulting in bad rendering by MS-Word whenever the very first cell of a table was empty.

XSL Utility

  • Upgrade to FOP 0.20.4 and DocBook-XSL 1.60.1.

Version 1.0p1 (10/31/2002)

Enhancements

  • Revised and extended API (Professional Edition).

Bug fixes

  • Particular values of some shorthand properties would cause a NullPointerException. This bug would show up for instance when the value of the border, border-top, border-bottom, border-left or border-right property did not specify the border color, e.g. border-top="solid".

  • A bad property value would possibly result in additional properties of the current object not being evaluated.

  • The background color of an outer block would not propagate to inner blocks.

  • SAX exceptions were not handled properly, causing a NullPointerException when trying to convert an ill-formed document.

Version 1.0 (07/26/2002)

First commercial version.

Enhancements

  • Support of keeps and breaks properties in tables.

  • Support of the scale-to-fit value of the content-width/content-height properties.

Bug fixes

  • The space-after and break-after properties were not handled properly.

  • Image scaling was inaccurate when the content-width or content-height property was specified as a <length> value.

Version 1.0b1 (06/05/2002)

New features

  • Automatic table layout.

  • Collapsing border model.

  • Support of the static-content (before and after regions), footnote and page-number elements.

Enhancements

  • Support of lists in table cells.

  • Full implementation of the separated border model.

  • Partial support of keeps and breaks properties.

  • Support of the baseline-shift property.

  • Support of the background color and border attributes of inline-level elements.

  • Better selection of a page master among alternatives.

  • Use of the bullet character (\u2022) as default label in bulleted lists.

Bug fixes

  • The font attributes of basic-link elements were ignored.

  • The monospace generic family was not bound to an actual monospaced font.

  • The list numbering type specification was not compatible with Word 97.

  • White space between two inline-level elements was entirely discarded.

  • The initial value of the column-number property did not consider row spans, possibly causing an incorrect table layout in some situations.

  • The initial value of the border-*-color properties was not properly set, possibly causing a NullPointerException in some situations.

  • XSL-FO extensions - e.g. fox - were not handled properly, resulting in an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException.

Version 0.9 (03/04/2002)

Initial release.