Release speedata Publisher 4.18

Last week I have released the new stable version 4.18 with some big internal changes, which hopefully don’t affect your documents. Very intensive testing has been done and all test files (currently more than 220 and some bigger production documents) run fine with the new version.

New XML/ XPath parser

This internal change is to make the new XML and XPath parser the default parser, which is a complete rewrite and is more robust than the old one.

HarfBuzz now default

I have also made the HarfBuzz font loader the default. HarfBuzz has many, many improvements over the previous simple font loader by supporting lots of OpenType features and complex scripts.

If you have documents that rely on the old settings, you can still activate them in the configuration file by setting

fontloader=fontforge
xpath=luxor

Other noteworthy improvements

• New logging output
• New feature DPI setting
• Markdown support

Information is now logged to the file publisher-protocol.xml and has structured output. The messages will not be logged to the standard output, unless you set verbose to true (verbose=true in the configuration file). You can also set the log level to control the amount of information you see (loglevel=debug or info, message, warn or error).

With the DPI setting in the <PDFOptions> command, you can reduce the PDF size by having a maximum DPI value for the whole document. Images are re-rendered on the fly to reduce the byte size so the PDF document gets smaller.

There is also some basic Markdown support. See the post about Markdown in the speedata Publisher for more information.