Release iText 5.3.1

New release for iText 5.3.1 and XML Worker, continue reading to find out more.

Release Notes:

iText 5.3.1 Core

I've been in the hospital with my son since Thursday. Before you ask: all is well with him. He had bone cancer in 2008, and he needed a prosthesis. As a result, he now needs a 'leg extension' on a regular basis. As long as his healthy leg grows, he'll need operations to make the other leg 'match'. The surgery went well. If it weren't for the fact that he has to get antibiotics intravenously until next Tuesday, he'd be allowed to go home. Of course: he'll be in a wheelchair for a while. After such an operation, the muscles in his leg are stretched making it impossible for him to bend his leg. He then needs to do exercises to make his muscles adapt to the new length.

While in the hospital, I prepared a new iText release. You can read all about it in the changelog. We needed the release because we've been fixing an XML Worker problem that was accidentally introduced in XML Worker 1.1.4: when you had a '<div>' tag enclosing plenty of other content, you could end up with only one page in the PDF whereas multiple pages were expected. This has been fixed now. So was the problem with some CSS properties that were inherited incorrectly. We've also introduced line-height support for the '<span>' tag.

As for the core iText, we're planning to offer better PDF/A support, and to prepare for this, we moved the PDF/A-related code to a separate package. If you upgrade, you'll need to apply slight changes to the code to create a PDF/A file (if you have such code in your application). Furthermore, we added support for more types of BMP files, and we're now ignoring incorrect ICC profiles in JPEGs (so that Adobe Reader no longer complains about 'insufficient Image data'). Finally, we've fixed all kinds of small bugs, for instance: the positioning of visible signatures was wrong if the appearance was less than 19pt high, our XMP implementation assumed that all keys of the info dictionary had PDF strings as value, and so on.

What's up next? Well, I'll continue writing the white paper about digital signatures, and we're also preparing for the first release of XFA Worker. We'll keep you posted!

Changelog:

iText 5.3.1 Core

Changes made by Eugene Markovskyi
- Improved the calculation of the leading in ColumnText
- Fixed pagination for PdfDiv class
Changes made by Alexander Chingarev
- Changed some access modifiers from private to protected.
- Splitted the PDF/A functionality so that it can be put in a different jar.
Changes made by Raf Hens
- Fixed a bug in PdfDocument: don't trim leading space when splitting on newline.
- Class BmpImage: Support for 52 and 56 byte BMP headers
- Class ICC_Profile: Ignore invalid ICC profile (wrong number of color components) especially in Jpegs.
Changes made by Bruno
- Removed some unnecessary imports.
- Bugfix: XmpWriter shouldn't assume that all info dictionary keys have a String value.
- The new PdfDiv element should also be allowed in Phrase and ColumnText.
- Separated the release info from Document into a separate class named Version.
- Fixed bugs reported by Michael Pradel:
  - Bug report #3548434: if nothing is added to a Section, addAll() should return false.
  - Bug report #3547811: fixed ClassCastException, and at the same time replaced if-construction by a switch in Phrase.add(index, element);
  - Bug report #3547812: Anchor assumes that it consists of Chunk objects only. This is not necessarily true.
- Introduction of a LINEHEIGHT attribute in class Chunk.
- Updated the link to the article about ExceptionConverter by Heinz Kabutz
- PdfSignatureAppearance: Fixed a problem with disappearing image if the height of the signature < 19 pt.

XML Worker 1.1.5

Changes made by Eugene Markovskyi
- Fixed pagination when using a
- Better support for leading / line-height (for instance: now also introduced for )
- Bugfix: CSS border properties should not be inherited
- Renamed the fontsize package to text_layout