Yesterday I came across a Reddit question:

“I have a pdf where the pages somehow got warped into page 2 then 1 then 4 then 3 then 6 then 5…etc Everything is right except the even pages are a step ahead of the odds.”

This is very easy to do with the speedata Publisher:

<Layout xmlns="urn:speedata.de:2009/publisher/en"
    xmlns:sd="urn:speedata:2009/publisher/functions/en">
    <Record element="data">
        <SetVariable variable="fn" select="'fivepages.pdf'" />
        <SetVariable variable="cp" select="sd:number-of-pages($fn)" />
        <Loop select="$cp div 2 " variable="i">
            <PlaceObject row="0mm" column="0mm">
                <Image file="{$fn}" page="{$i * 2}" />
            </PlaceObject>
            <ClearPage />
            <PlaceObject row="0mm" column="0mm">
                <Image file="{$fn}" page="{$i * 2 - 1}" />
            </PlaceObject>
            <ClearPage />
        </Loop>
        <Switch>
            <Case test="sd:odd($cp)">
                <PlaceObject row="0mm" column="0mm">
                    <Image file="{$fn}" page="{$cp}" />
                </PlaceObject>
            </Case>
        </Switch>
    </Record>
</Layout>

The speedata Publisher has a new (pro) feature to reduce the file size of the resulting PDF. This works by setting a maximum DPI value for bitmap images (PNG and JPG).

The speedata Publisher has now (version 4.17.11) basic support for markdown, an easy to use markup language.

As an example of markdown formatting, this snippet creates a level 1 heading and a simple bullet list:

# A title

* one
* anotherone
* three

Using markdown with the speedata Publisher is very easy. There is a new layout function called sd:markdown()

The speedata Publisher is built on top of LuaTeX, a TeX variant that has an integrated Lua (5.x) implementation. Lua is a language specifically designed for integration in a host software. Most of the code of the speedata Publisher is written in Lua, but there are some (non-typesetting) parts where Lua is not much fun to write:

• Unicode handling
• regular expressions
• XML parsing
• Resource (URL, file) access

All of these “modules” are written in Go and compiled into a library that is loaded during runtime (dll, shared object). Now the big question is: how to access the library?

The version 4.17.1 introduces a completely new logging backend. The idea is to have a short summary of the speedata Publishing run (name of the PDF file, error and warning count and version number) and a more detailed protocol file.

When you run the speedata Publisher on a “hello, world” layout, you will get output like this:

Run speedata publisher 4.17.1 (Pro)
Finished with 0 errors and 0 warnings
Output written on publisher.pdf (1 pages, 3071 bytes)
Transcript written to publisher-protocol.xml
Total run time: 65.976541ms

The publisher-protocol.xml file (which replaces the old publisher.protocol) contains more information, depending on the log level. Normally (without warnings or errors) this file is more or less empty:

Six months after releasing the last stable 4.14, the speedata Publisher is now at version 4.16. There have been a few major improvements:

• Rewrite the MetaPost integration, including support for opacity and text.
• Rewrite the XPath parser and re-activate the Go based XML parser for better error handling and data access.

Also a few minor enhancements

I am currently approaching the “zero bugs” watermark (except for two almost persistent bugs that I tend to ignore) so it is time to think about releasing a new stable version and,shortly after, version 5:

The development of the speedata Publisher has one big “mantra”: existing setups must work with newer versions of the speedata Publisher without change. So you can always upgrade the latest development version without having to fear that you need to change your layout file.

This imposes limitations on development and usage of course. New features have new XML tags or attributes. For example the version 2.3.39 introduced a command to set options for PDF processing. This only affects layout files that use this commands, old layout files simply ignore this command. Similar with attributes, for example the balance attribute in tables was introduced in version 3.1.24. In this case, older versions of the speedata Publisher will not balance the table, but will continue to work.

There are some major new technologies introduced since the speedata Publisher was first published in 2010. These usually work with a feature flag:

The version 4.15.8 of the speedata Publisher contains a completely rewritten XML and XPath parser. Currently this is opt in, but it will be the default in version 5 of the speedata Publisher.

The old (current) implementation is a combination of an ad-hoc XML parser and an XPath parser, both written in pure lua. These parser works fine in practice, but are too fault tolerant and do not give enough information in case of an error. In some errors these parsers get into a bad state. There have been many, many issues fixed related to these two parser parts since starting the development.