ARender 4.0.5-1 is available!

A detailed list of changes (release note) is available at this address.

The documentation mentionned in 4.0.4 is now available. This documentation is always updated as soon as ARender is being built. You have two different documentations :

• The new revamped quick start documentation :  https://arender.io/docs/autoupdate/arender-english-documentation/
• The complete documentation that you are used to know, of which the maintenance will soon stop : https://arender.io/doc/current4/

Short word :

If you currently run an ARender 4.0.5 installation, we recommend you to proceed to the upgrade to ARender 4.0.5-1.

New for ARender 4.0.5-1 :

✔️ Upgrade to Spring Boot 2.

When ARender 4.0.0 was being prepared, Spring Boot 2 was just released and ARender could not go with the stability offered by Spring Boot 2 at the time. Now that a couple of versions have passed, ARender jumps the gap and catches up to the versions!

This includes (but not only) : overall more recent libraries, security and performance upgrades compared to Spring Boot 1.5.x versions.

We piggybacked on the upgrade for Spring Boot to start some refactoring into the rendition backend.

✔️ JNIMicroService performance

We studied key points of congestion into the micro service architecture and improved drasticly the performance of JNIMicroService. Images generation workloads will now better use the available performance on the machine running the service, and provides to end users a much greater quality of service and response time to images requests.

✔️ Redaction rework

The « redact » annotation now behaves differently than the other annotations :

• Unless specified as an user which can see redacted content, the annotation will be opaque over the document
• After reload, any users which cannot see redacted content will be offered a redacted document (not only annotated, but forged into the PDF)

A callback has been provided into the ARender front end service so that you can implement your own logic of « super-users » which can see redacted content. Using this callback, ARender will show either the redacted document, or the base document with redact annotations. Hovering the annotation will reveal the underlying content.

✔️ Consolidate operations of document composition

The mergeAll documents button now makes its return only when multiple documents are opened in ARender. As well, the service responsible to merge those documents have been consolidated, and can support a much bigger limit of documents that it used to be able to (~10 times more). The limit is now mostly based on your system available ressources.

✔️ Emails/Zip loading times enhancements

Emails and zip files had their temporary files cleanup slowing down the overall conversion performance. Now ARender 4 is back to ARender 3 behavior:

• As soon as the document the front end asked is converted, the mail/zip can start to be opened in the end user browser.

Files deletion is now done in a background task post-conversion.

✔️ Images contained in emails that are not supported by browsers now converted on the fly by ARender

If your emails from your ECM used to contain images that are not supported by a recent browser, it was impossible to ARender so far to display them properly. We now handle them beforehand and convert them into a format that any regular browser supports.

✔️ Scrolling performance in ARender

Reshaped the annotation load/unload stream mechanism. As it is not visible, you may not know that ARender loads and unloads its annotations dynamically according to the pages you are currently browsing in order to save resources.

This mechanism, done on the scroll, had grown bigger over time and the additionnal features it gained. We reshaped and optimise its tasks in order to limit its impact. On scroll, the only ARender resources used are consumed by the images being added, compared to before a major part (more than 90%) of it being the annotation loading/unloading.

✔️ Contrast/Brightness filters

As a starter of ARender image filtering in order to make some documents more accessible to people with reduced sight, we bright two new filters : Brightness and constrast.

Those filters apply by default to the entire document (can be configured to be a per page logic). On Chrome, FireFox, those filters will be rendered using the end user desktop as those browsers support it. On Microsoft browsers, it will be done on the rendition server side as a fallback. Please be aware of that when considering the deployment of this feature to your end users.

✔️ Custom stamps

From ARender 4.0.5-1, we started to extend the use of local storage in the end user browser. This allows end user to now create a set of custom textual stamp they can build on their side (font color, background color, border color, content)

The stamp creation popup now offer a field with a preview of a custom stamp. The end user can then either use directly its custom stamp, or save it in its local storage for later use. If the number of stamps reach maximal capacity, the button will become grayed out.