All the ARender team is pleased to announce you the release of the 3.1.0 major version.
New features:
Annotations containing text are now called ‘StickyNotes’. This implies changes in the labels displayed to the users, as well as configuration names in the properties files.
Here is the list of new parameters regarding the old “post-it” annotation.
topPanel.annotationMenu.stickyNote=true
topPanel.annotationMenu.stickyNote.editable=true
annotation.stickyNote.opacity=1.0
annotation.stickyNote.minimum.width=140
annotation.stickyNote.minimum.height=70
annotation.stickyNote.default.color=#EAF39C
annotation.stickyNote.hide.border=true
annotation.stickyNote.hide.details=false
contextualMenu.hasStickyNote=true
annotationExplorer.showStickyNoteReplies=false
annotationExplorer.showStickyNoteLabel=true
ARender presentation server now periodically polls each rendition target provided in its configuration in order to find the best suited target for each document to handle.
Respectively, it is now the job of the rendition to express itself both in RMI and REST APIs regarding its current performance status. (CPU usage, memory usage, number of documents currently parsed, number of total documents in cached memory)
The robustness of the old ARender mechanism still exist and remains for already opened documents, as they are already opened in one available rendition.
If a rendition server shuts down, the next polling will notice this and view the rendition server as down and won’t ask this server (unless all servers are unresponsive and in this case the presentation server will try anyway).
Finally we tuned our client caches and found out we could drastically improve the page contents (textual information overlayed on documents) cache. Now annotations text in the annotation explorer display themselves instantly without calls to the presentation server.
We focused many new features on the way ARender feels when using it on a day to day basis.
As an example, we decided to remove the loading image when documents have permanently failed to open. The loading image is therefore now representative of a real workload in the background.
Annotations can now also be saved on zip, email, multi-document based documents and a pop-up will warn users if they forgot to save their annotations before switching documents.
You can also load hyperlinks directly into ARender main window, transforming ARender into a smooth web browsing experience if needed when trying to visualize a link contained in a file.
hyperlinks.loadInARender=true
The contextual menu can now be activated in a mode that repeats the icon in each of the possible actions. This greatly simplifies the use of the contextual menu when not familiar with the textual description of the annotations.
contextualMenu.icons.enabled = true
Watch your videos with ARender! If the format isn’t directly supported by the web browser, it will be converted at rendition side then displayed.
By default, only .mov files will be converted as a sample example. If you want to add more supported mime types, modify the arender-rendition.xml file in the rendition conf folder at the following line:
<entry>
<key>
<value>video/quicktime</value>
</key>
<ref bean= »videoConversionFactory » />
</entry>
It is now possible to view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio files into ARender with a transformation to pdf based on Microsoft Office. This set of new features (Word only was supported before) comes with a list of new requirements updated that you can find on the documentation at this address:
Performance of this conversion is much faster than using a LibreOffice backend and can go up to 10 times faster.
On a side note, we improved the LibreOffice backend by setting a manual timer in case the LibreOffice process would happen to get stuck and could cause issues to the rendition servers.
New supported annotation format : Cloud annotations. If imported from Adobe Reader, cloud annotations are now handled.
It is also possible to create annotation with the cloud style already applied. Refer to the ARender documentation cookbook concerning custom annotations for more details.
You can now export annotations in a csv format based on apache lang3 reflection.
topPanel.documentMenu.downloadCSVAnnotations=true
annotation.loadingGIF=true
annotation.loadPerPage=true
We entirely reworked the way ARender compares documents, using a new algorithm inspired from state of the art “diff” mechanisms. Document headers will show how many differences there are between the two documents.
Therefore, we also included a whole lot of new functionalities to use extensively this feature:
We added the possibility to launch ARender by URL directly in multi-document view or comparison view.
visualization.multiView.doComparison=true
or
visualization.multiView.showOnStart=true
You can deactivate the default synchronized scroll on both documents.
visualization.multiView.synchronized=true
On clicks from any modification between two documents, the corresponding modification on the other document will be displayed.
AnnotationExplorer : configure maximum visible size of annotation text content visible. Should adapt to AnnotationExplorer width as well.
An event is now triggered when all documents are loaded, in a multi-document context (Folder, Zip, Mails, …).
We added the possibility to create custom buttons launching an AnnotationCreationEvent :
As the detailed functionality of this feature is verbose, please refer to the online documentation at this address:
The AnnotationCreationPolicy contains now a list of accessible security levels for the user to choose from, populating Annotation.security field at GUI.
This allows custom connectors to setup a list of properties they wish to use as security levels
The detailed documentation is available at this address:
This section contains a list of summarized bugs we could fix for this 3.1.0 release of ARender.
XFDF Stamp annotations with CDATA appearance are not properly handled and generated as image stamps to resemble the look and feel of Adobe Reader stamps.
Vertices annotations were not available in “download with annotations”.
Using REST API, document builder new document operations were always saved with « Document.pdf » name, it is not the case.
IPads couldn’t download documents.
Multiple documents view : a popup will ask to save annotations when changing documents.
We enabled JNIPDFRenderer to use custom fonts, as long as they are deposited in the rendition folder in a folder named fonts.
Mail content was empty for some message documents, we linked this issue to the merged mail factory that did not convert RTF content by default. It is now the case. We also reworked our algorithm to detect encoding of characters in order to support a wider range of encoding sets.
Changed Brasilian language from br to pt_br, the correct value.
Overall improvement of sticky note annotations in Internet explorer (only difference remains in the oldest IE8 in which shift+enter creates a new empty line, enter clears the current line to a new line)
Some Visio File were recognized as word file, plain text as quick time and html as plain text, this is now fixed.
AROMS2PDF - Images in a word document could be rendered with a bad quality due to an incorrect setting of printQuality. The highest quality is now used in all converters in this new Aroms2Pdf build.
Support RTL copy-paste and search for right-to-left languages
Erroneous invalidation of Rendition server affinity (HA) when re-opening an already open document is now fixed.
Forbid document switching in comparison mode except for the two currently compared documents
The text in a textual Stamp text could go over the stamp border due to window resizing. Stamps now wait the full resize of the window before binding the box to the good text size.