Xpdf Version 4.02 Released
2019 Sep 25
Welcome to Glyph & Cog's newsletter for September 2019.
Table of contents:
Xpdf 4.02 released
Glyph & Cog is pleased to announce version 4.02 of Xpdf and all of the Xpdf libraries and components.
4.02 is primarily a bug fix release. As usual, this is an incremental release. For our commercial licensees, 4.02 is a small step from the previous 4.01.04 release.
4.02 does include several minor security patches, so we recommend that everyone upgrade.
There are some new features in the open source release:
Pdftohtml now extracts embedded fonts.
Various user interface tweaks in XpdfReader: added a button to toggle sidebar visibilty, added menu items to toggle the sidebar and toolbar, added the 'initialDisplayMode', 'initialToolbarState', and 'initialSelectMode' xpdfrc settings.
If XpdfReader is already running, double-clicking on a PDF file (or dragging-and-dropping it on the XpdfReader icon) opens the file in a new tab (via the new '-open' command line switch).
XFA Rasterization
Interactive forms in PDF file come in three flavors:
AcroForm is the original format, dating back to PDF 1.2. The form background (i.e., the part you would see if you looked at an unfilled paper form) is drawn as ordinary PDF content. Then the AcroForm (embedded in the PDF file) specifies where the form fields are located and provides values for those fields.
XFA (XML Forms Architecure) was introduced with PDF 1.5. There are two ways to use XFA. Static XFA works similarly to AcroForms. The form background is drawn as PDF content, and the embedded XFA describes the field locations and field values.
The second option is dynamic XFA. With dynamic XFA, all content -- background and fields -- is specified in XFA format, and the PDF file is effectively just a wrapper around an XFA file.
Xpdf can currently display AcroForms and static XFA forms (though it doesn't provide interactive form filling).
We're working on a dynamic XFA rasterizer, which converts dynamic XFA forms to "flattened" PDF files. If you're interested in this functionality, please contact us: info@glyphandcog.com.
Future plans
We're hard at work on Xpdf 5.0. It will take advantage of newer C++ features, including better memory management. It will also include architectural changes incorporating everything we've learned from 24 years of working with the current Xpdf codebase.
Before you ask -- no, we don't have a timeframe yet. But we'll certainly continue to provide updates via this newsletter.
Glyph & Cog
Glyph & Cog has been a leading provider of software components for PDF manipulation since 2002.
For more information on any of the products mentioned here, see our web site:
http://www.glyphandcog.com/
or email us at info@glyphandcog.com
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