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Upgrade release

Friday, October 10, 2014

Upgrade release

Artifex Announces Fall 2014 Upgrade Release

For immediate release
Contact: Miles Jones

Artifex is pleased to announce upgrade releases for SmartOffice 2, Ghostscript, and MuPDF.
SmartOffice 2
SmartOffice 2 is a leading mobile solution for MS Office files. View, edit, create, convert, share, and print documents from your iOS, Android, Blackberry, Linux and Windows Phone 8 mobile devices. SmartOffice excels at displaying content and providing a wide range of features. In this v 2.3.4 release Artifex has concentrated its efforts on improving core competency in layout accuracy. Some of the many fixes in this release are:
Over 300M copies of Smart Office have been sold.

  • Support for pptx bullets
  • Correct font metrics
  • Support for pptx style rules
  • Support for tabs in pptx
  • Improved tabs in .docx
  • Added Tahoma font
  • Support for center aligned tabs
  • Support for right aligned tabs
  • Support for hanging indent as a tab point
  • Support for decimal tabs
  • Support for tab leaders
  • Correct line spacing
  • Chart improvement: colors
  • Chart improvement: gradient fill
  • Chart improvement: scatter charts
  • Support for special case bullets
  • Support for Wingdings and Symbol fonts
  • Correct document grid spacing
  • Support for line space reductions
  • Support for paragraph background color
  • Improved compression for PDF conversion of images

Ghostscript
Ghostscript is the highly acclaimed PDF, PostScript, PCL, and XPS interpreter suite that allows users to render, convert, view and print PDL files. Ghostscript is licensed by over 100 OEM customers providing hundreds of products sold to millions of end-users.

In this release of Ghostscript v 9.15 there are numerous improvements in the high level devices. The pdfwrite and ps2write can now optionally write output without fonts. Instead graphics primitives are used allowing for processing with printers or other software that could be problematic with fonts. The default is to preserve the original source fonts for quality and performance reasons.

There is ongoing improvement in color management for writing pdf. This project was discussed at length in the last newsletter. Other improvements include better support for link annotations: GoTo and GotoR actions are now written properly. These specify a destination link in the current or a remote document, respectively.

There is updated support for ATX printer devices; these are label printer devices found in kiosk ticket printers. Ghostscript is a very popular tool for driving small, specialized printing devices like ATX printers.

Finally, there is added support for PDF security handler revision 6, this is an undocumented PDF security feature which exists in certain PDF files in the wild.

MuPDF
MuPDF is a lightweight (1Mb) high performance PDF interpreter used in mobile applications by companies like Adobe, Dropbox, HP, Ricoh, and Intel.

The major news for the MuPDF v 1.5 release is Artifex’s own EPUB implementation. EPUB is an import e-book file format designed for reflowable content allowing it to support many devices. Most dedicated e-book readers, Nook, Blackberry, PlayBook, etc, support EPUB. It is also well established on the desktop and mobile platforms using: iBooks, Pages, Adobe products, and Calibre (open source). MuPDF outperforms competitors with it’s small footprint and very fast rendering speed. MuPDF’s agile core will compete effectively in the EPUB marketplace, bringing performance improvements just as it’s done in the mobile PDF ecosystem. The expectation is to have a partial implementation for preview by the end of the year.

Please contact us if you would like to try it out.

There are additional bug fixes and general improvements. Please see MuPDF News for a detailed list. (www.mupdf.com/news). Artifex offers SmartOffice, Ghostscript and MuPDF, the most complete software solutions for the mobile, cloud/server, embedded printing and host-based markets. Support for MS Office and all leading PDLs including PDF, PostScript, XPS, and PCL5, along with fonts, screening, and advanced color-handling. Millions have benefited from the ability to preview documents or provide high quality raster for printed output. Artifex’s SmartOffice, Ghostscript and MuPDF combine the tools, information and support to meet the quality and performance requirements of its OEM customers.