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HexaPDF 1.0.0 Published on

HexaPDF has been quite stable for a long time now. So without further ado I’m happy to announce the release of HexaPDF 1.0.0!

And to celebrate this occasion you can get HexaPDF licenses at 15% off with the discount code “10YEARS” for the next two weeks!

Changes

Feature-wise this release is like the usual releases. The most important new feature is the ability to merge interactive forms (AcroForms) when merging PDFs, using the new MergeAcroForm task. There is also a new #write_to_string method for more easily writing a PDF document to a string.

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

BreakVer Versioning Scheme

All versions until now were 0.x versions where nobody should expect much in terms of compatibility between versions. Even so, HexaPDF tried to follow a simple strategy for its 0.y.z version numbers:

  • If a version only contains bug fixes, increment the patch version (“z”).

  • If a version contains new features, increment the minor version (“y”).

  • If a version contains breaking changes, increment the minor version (“y”) and highlight the breaking changes in the changelog.

Going forward HexaPDF will follow a similar scheme and intentionally not adhere to what’s nowadays called “semantic versioning”.

Interestingly, somebody was thinking along the same lines and created BreakVer a few yers ago which is the versioning scheme HexaPDF will be using from now on. In short:

  • Version numbers still consist of “major.minor.patch”.

  • A bump in the patch number indicates that there are no breaking changes. Usually this will be done only when a release contains just bug fixes.

  • A bump in the minor number indicates that there might be minor breaking changes. Those breaking changes will be highlighted clearly in the changelog so that this can easily be seen by just glancing at the changelog. Most such releases will contain new features and no breaking changes, though.

  • A bump in the major number indicates that there might be (and usually are) major breaking changes. Again, those breaking changes are clearly highlighted in the changelog. Such releases will usually be done when introducing major architectural changes.

So why not use SemVer? HexaPDF has a very large public API surface. If SemVer was strictly followed, this could (and probably would) lead to high major numbers rather fast. And for me major numbers should indicate major changes in the codebase.

For example, in version 0.40.0 there was a single breaking change, renaming the style property ‘text_overflow’ to ‘overflow’. In SemVer this would have led to bumping the major number. With BreakVer bumping the minor number would be the correct choice.

What’s Next for HexaPDF?

HexaPDF has been quite stable for a while now. Releasing version 1.0.0 provides another indication to existing and potential users that it is a mature library that can be relied on. Read the blog post “10 Years of HexaPDF” to find out more about the journey.

But releasing version 1.0.0 doesn’t mean that HexaPDF is finished! Quite the opposite, there are still many parts of the PDF specification that can and will be implemented. The document creation and layout facilities can always be improved as well. And my private to-do list contains more than 150 items, so… :-)

For the near future there are plans to implement:

  • Logical structures (PDF 2.0 section 14.7) which is a pre-requisite for tagged PDF
  • LTV (long term validation) signatures
  • More annotation types
  • And many smaller internal changes and optimizations

If you need something that is not yet implemented, please create an issue.

HexaPDF 0.35.0 - Fallback Fonts Published on

This release contains many small features and fixes and breaking changes. So make sure you read the changelog before upgrading!

The most notable additions and changes are:

  • The document layout engine gained support for fallback fonts. Just define the fallback fonts using the new configuration option ‘font.fallback’ and you are set.

    fallback font example

    The fallback font support is also used when generating appearances for AcroForm text fields.

  • It is now possible to use the document layout functionality for a single canvas/page via the new HexaPDF::Content::CanvasComposer class, easily instantiated via canvas.composer.

  • The style properties ‘align’ and ‘valign’ have been renamed (breaking change) to ‘text_align’ and ‘text_valign’ so that the old names can be used for box placement. With the addition of the style property ‘mask_mode’ one has now even more control over box placement, e.g. overlaying boxes is now possible (see the added example).

  • The new ‘psd’ command for hexapdf inspect provides easier to read output for page content streams, e.g. by decoding the text output parts and showing the nesting levels.

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

HexaPDF 0.34.0 - Optional Content aka Layers Published on

The highlight of this release is the support for optional content aka layers.

Optional content allows one to selectively show or hide content. It is most often used to provide something akin to layers, think a building plan with separate layers for the walls, electrical infrastructure, furniture and so on. However, it can also be used for something more mundane, like hiding the answers of a quiz.

Apart from this larger change there is a new style property HexaPDF::Layout::Style#fill_horizontal which allows a text fragment to fill the remaining space of a line. This is very useful when creating table of content entries.

There is new documentation for the optional content feature and the document creation section got a new how-tos section which will be expanded in the future.

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