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HexaPDF 0.28.0 Published on

This is another release with many small additions, a few breaking changes and fixes.

Here is an overview:

  • Interactive Forms (AcroForm) gained the ability to correctly format numbers by implementing the Javascript AFNumber_Format method. Note that only this one method is currently supported and there is no general Javascript support. You can see this in action in the AcroForm example.

    Additionally, iterating over all form field widgets was greatly sped up by relying on the validation feature to combine same-name fields. This means that, in some cases, you will need to run doc.acro_form.validate before working with individual fields.

    There are also several fixes to avoid creating appearances if there are already existing ones. And rotated form fields are now also supported.

  • Annotation handling was improved in two ways: By rotating annotations in case a page gets rotated. And by enhancing the flattening of annotations to work for rotated annotations.

  • Fully-embedded TrueType fonts can now be used, e.g. when filling out interactive forms.

  • HexaPDF can now tell whether a PDF file is a linearized PDF. That information is also shown in the output of hexapdf info. And the two revisions of a linearized PDF are now treated as a single revision.

  • Importing objects from other documents has been simplified to allow the import of arbitrary objects.

Additionally, the HexaPDF documentation has been restructured to provide a more topic oriented structure. For example, there is a section Interactive forms which contains everything related to interactive forms. Additionally, a Getting started section has been added as well as a section for Outline.

The new documentation structure should make it easier for newcomers to find what they need since most people come to the HexaPDF website with a specific goal in mind, for example, creating documents or filling out interactive forms.

Finally, with the new Ruby 3.2.0 release which marks the YJIT just in time compiler as production ready, HexaPDF gets a nice performance boost and compares very well against the C++ library qpdf when optimizing PDF files:

Optimization benchmark

Here are the raw numbers:

|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                              ||    Time |     Memory |   File size |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| hexapdf CS  | a.pdf          |    194ms |  30,100KiB |      49,225 |
| hexapdf CS YJIT | a.pdf      |    278ms |  35,184KiB |      49,225 |
| qpdf CS     | a.pdf          |     17ms |   8,112KiB |      49,287 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| hexapdf CS  | b.pdf          |    744ms |  50,024KiB |  11,045,208 |
| hexapdf CS YJIT | b.pdf      |    752ms |  57,572KiB |  11,045,208 |
| qpdf CS     | b.pdf          |    328ms |  22,980KiB |  11,126,861 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| hexapdf CS  | c.pdf          |  1,390ms |  54,304KiB |  13,180,713 |
| hexapdf CS YJIT | c.pdf      |  1,120ms |  59,652KiB |  13,180,713 |
| qpdf CS     | c.pdf          |  1,177ms |  95,548KiB |  13,228,102 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| hexapdf CS  | d.pdf          |  3,012ms |  77,724KiB |   6,418,481 |
| hexapdf CS YJIT | d.pdf      |  2,498ms |  83,852KiB |   6,418,481 |
| qpdf CS     | d.pdf          |  1,655ms |  69,220KiB |   6,703,374 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| hexapdf CS  | e.pdf          |    717ms | 109,732KiB |  21,751,181 |
| hexapdf CS YJIT | e.pdf      |    744ms | 114,452KiB |  21,751,180 |
| qpdf CS     | e.pdf          |    388ms |  31,376KiB |  21,787,558 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| hexapdf CS  | f.pdf          | 42,854ms | 549,772KiB | 117,545,254 |
| hexapdf CS YJIT | f.pdf      | 31,712ms | 553,196KiB | 117,545,254 |
| qpdf CS     | f.pdf          | 25,788ms | 975,180KiB | 118,114,521 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|

Have a look at the last section for f.pdf in the results above: Without YJIT HexaPDF takes around 42 seconds, with YJIT only 31 seconds! qpdf is still faster with around 25 seconds but uses nearly twice the memory.

As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of all changes.