Release Notes
Version DR1 (First Developers' Release)
Released 2001 April 16
- View Page Source
- Toolbar: buttons for forward/previous page, type-in box for URL, ...
- Cookies
- HTML 3.2 support (rest of TABLE cases, FRAME, FORM)
- JavaDoc comments on major core classes
- web site established
Version DR2
Released 2001 May 23
Version DR3: PDF, Part 1
Released 2001 October 22
2MB of source code, 668K JAR.
- phase one of PDF
- TeX fonts cleaned up
and bundled with DVI so you don't have to install them in your OS
(TeX fonts aren't general purpose, so you don't want to)
- external/user hubs
- expanded developer documentation
Version DR4: PDF, Part 2
Released 2002 March 7
2.18MB of source code,
811K JAR (including debugging symbols).
- PDF phase 2 (encryption, color spaces,
bundled font metrics for core 14 fonts,
Unicode mappings for all standards font encodings,
FAX and inline images, hyperlinks, zooming, Form XObject)
- Hardware-accelerated rendering with VolatileImage
- Bug fixing, documentation writing, source code cleanup
- first advertisement to general public, to freshmeat
- discussion groups on sourceforge.net
Version DR5
Released 2002 July 10
2.35MB of source code, 876K executable JAR
- PDF
(clipping, predictor functions, line attributes,
named destinations, fast and high quality FAX scaling,
enhanced OCR, most popular gradient type, Type 3 fonts)
- full screen slide
for multipage documents (PDF, DVI, Xdoc, ...)
- browser remote control
- testing against a collection of over 100 dissimilar PDFs,
culled from a set of 1000s
Version DR6: Tools and Developer Hooks
Released 2003 February 14
2.8MB of source code, 974K executable JAR
- PDF repair / recompress / edit
- PDF info
- extracting text from any format
- interface to Lucene search engine
- PDF read/render classes better documented, new PDFWriter
- generally useful classes better exposed
- embeddable in Java Swing-based applications
- external independent JARs
- expanded developer documentation (API, "How to Write a Media Adaptor") and
architecture diagram
- generally improved media adaptors,
as with fractional metrics for PDF and DVI
- introduced automatic test suite,
complementing collection of test documents for manual inspection
Release 7: PDF 1.5 and Tools
Released 2003 September 1
3.18 MB of source code, 1.1 MB executable JAR, test suite: 3235 lines
- PDF updates for PDF Specification 1.5 / Acrobat 6.0
- read/write support for object streams and cross-reference streams
- crypt filters
- JPEG2000 image compression (if JAI Image I/O is installed)
- PDF Tools
- Compress 2.0 with duplicate object elimination, PDF 1.5 object streams, and Compact PDF format
- new tools: Encrypt and Decrypt, Split and Merge, Validate, Undo
- extensive testing
- Developers
- incorporated BZip2 library from Apache
- tightened type checking with Java generics
- reorganized web site into Browser, Tools, Developer, Research
- changed version numbering from "Developers Release" to "Release"
since tools are well tested and production quality
Release 8: Fonts
Released 2004 February 6
3.51 MB of source code, 2.73 MB executable JAR, test suite: 3628 lines
- Browser
- runnable from paths that contains spaces, for Windows (
Program Files
directory) and Java Web Start
- PDF
- support for embedded Type 1 fonts (both Type 1 and Type 1C/Type 2/CFF formats)
- more tenacious font name matching
- support for Type 0 / CID-keyed fonts
- initial support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean encodings, including bundled CMap files from Adobe
- support of ToUnicode maps, for text extraction
- font subpixel kerning
- rotated text
- support for 4-color JPEGs (both YCCK and CMYK color spaces), such as produced by Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign
- support for L*a*b* JPEGs (which are rare)
- Tools
- new PDF tool: Impose (n-up)
- ExtractText: supports PDF Type 0 fonts (used by some Latin and most CJK documents)
- new PageImages: convert PDF documents to page images
- PDF Info: adds report of font and image use
- PDF Compress: "Two Diet Plans for Fat PDF" paper
- Font: new inspection (View, Info) and conversion
- DVI
- fonts taken from TEXMF tree
- Developers
- PDF LZW decompression generalized to handle UNIX compress format too
Release 8.1: Bug Fixes
Released 2004 March 2
- support TrueType Collection fonts, which caused on Windows XP with Asian fonts caused an
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 2
- adjust PDF tools with
-inplace
option for Windows
- PDF Merge tool merges outlines/bookmarks and links, renaming named destinations if necessary
- fix for JWS 1.4.2 (whose behavior is different than JWS 1.2)
Release 8.2: Bug Fixes
Released 2004 March 15
- Improvements to Type 3 display and text extraction.
- Fixes for recently closed bugs in Bug Tracker,
including fixes affecting PageImages, PDF Compress, PDF Merge, and ExractText.
Release 8.3: Tuning
Released 2004 April 15
- moved web pages from cs.berkeley.edu to multivalent.sourceforge.net
- license changed to GPL
- PDF
- workarounds for buggy PDF generators
- Ghostscript 5.x bug in generating inline images where Height is too big
- FOP 0.20.3 inserts the Tc PDF operator in the middle of the TJ operator
- font tuning: spacing, baseline tracking, character unencoded by embedded PDF encoding uses font's intrinsic encoding, find X11 fonts, find Windows CJK fonts, better shaping of old OS9 fonts on OS X
- refinements on images: 4 bits per sample, Fax where /Width != /Columns
- Tools
- ExtractText: further tuned word identification (from PDF's letter clusters)
- Compress and Uncompress were affected by the Ghostscript bug above
Release 8.4: Bug Fixes and Performance
Released 2005 December 31
- Tools
- ExtractText can now, in addition to reporting text, can also report structure, links, and bounding boxes
- PDF: bug fixes for Decrypt and Split
- PDF Split: option for double-sided printing on non-duplex printer
- PDF Split and Compress: fixed for PDFs without outlines/bookmarks
- PDF Split and Impose: empty page indicated by
blank
or b
(not 0
anymore)
- PDF
- Fixes for recently closed bugs in Bug Tracker:
too-short length in stream by buggy pdfFactory Pro v1.53,
trailing '\0' in UTF-16 by PDFMaker 5.0,
minus sign in middle of number ("108.-143") by Fine Reader
- support DeviceN color space
- new media adaptor: Apple II AppleWorks word processor
- Browser
- performance bug with some operating systems identified and worked around, so now fast performance on all platforms
- Fabio Corubolo's Fab Four
- Developers
- demos (
MyBehavior.java
, Embed.java
, ...) collected in src/multivalent/demo
directory
- prebuilt Javadoc generated once again
- logging (try
-verbose
to trace semantic events)
- Practical Thought
established to provide commercial licensing and support,
interfaces for easy use by other applications,
more features,
consulting.
Future
Release 8.5
- Last Version Compatible with Java 1.4
Release 9.0
2006
Release 10.0
- Requires Java 6
- JavaScript for HTML