from Patrick Gundlach |

Release stable version 4.20

Categories: Development

After more than half a year, 150 commits and 40 minor releases, I have now published version 4.20, which is hopefully the last stable version before the “big five”.

As always, old document should run without any changes. You might have to switch on compatibility modes with --xpath=lxpath and --option fontloader=fontforge on the command line, but in most cases, the new defaults should not change your document output

There are some major enhancements compared to the previous stable version (4.18):

  • Fully accessible documents (PDF/UA)
  • XPath parser now well tested and with more functionality
  • ZUGFeRD attachment compatible with version 2.0

And some minor enhancements

  • Spot color saturation
  • Ability to flip (mirror) objects
  • Derived glyphs now copy-able in HarfBuzz mode
  • PDF/A-3 selectable as an output format
  • Font sizes and shift for superscript and subscript can be configured
  • Inner and outer margins in Pagetype
  • New strategy for NoBreak: reduce=fontfit
  • Font expansion setting configurable

Fully accessible documents (PDF/UA)

You can now create accessible PDF documents in a fully automatic workflow. You need to define the roles of each element (“this is a heading…”) and take care of the correct order of the elements in the PDF. The PAC (PDF accessibility checker) is very happy with the PDFs that come out of the speedata Publisher. There is a whole section in the documentation dedicated to PDF/UA output.

XPath parser (lxpath)

The (not so) new (anymore) Lua XPath 2.0 parser has been thoroughly tested and is now recommended for all new projects. It can be set into a strict namespace mode which makes it easy to work with mixed namespace data.

It also handles variables more consistent than before.

ZUGFeRD attachments

ZUGFeRD (electronic invoices, also known as Factur-X in France) have got an overhaul. The file name of the attached file is now factur-x.xml for version 2. The PDF/A-3 conformance has also improved by writing output intents for CMYK colors (configurable) and a few other minor improvements.

You can download the version 4.20 as always at https://download.speedata.de. Enjoy!